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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29193855">Truth &amp; Lies &amp; Something In-Between</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/asy_the_atrocity/pseuds/asy_the_atrocity'>asy_the_atrocity</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Anxiety, Author is Not a Clay | Dream Apologist (Video Blogging RPF), Author is Not a Dream SMP Apologist (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream Angst (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Dissociation, Dream Redemption!, Dream Smp, Dream's Prison Arc!, Drista makes an appearance, Gen, I mean, I took a lot of liberties, Prisoner Clay | Dream (Video Blogging RPF), Self-Harm, Self-Indulgent, Seriously guys this got way darker than i intended, Starvation, Suicidal Ideation, Tension, Unreliable Narrator, can author be neutral, he did wrong and was bad but he doesnt deserve the prison &gt;:(, sorry - Freeform</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:01:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>30,082</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29193855</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/asy_the_atrocity/pseuds/asy_the_atrocity</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The lava falls gently and excruciatingly slowly, but Dream can’t be bothered to greet him at the netherite blocks, waiting for them to be pushed down and for the boy to enter his cell.</p><p>No, instead Dream lies on the floor like he’s been doing for…. how long? Hours? Days? Dream hasn’t even bothered to see if he has a clock, or even the time as he is. </p><p>There’s no point. </p><p>Time is infinite when there’s nowhere to go.</p><p>(Or, in which Dream has time to think, and tries to do anything but.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Clay | Dream &amp; Clay | Dream's Sister Drista (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream &amp; Darryl Noveschosch, Clay | Dream &amp; GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream &amp; Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream &amp; Tubbo (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream (Video Blogging RPF) &amp; TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>164</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1142</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Runaway (From My Mind)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I've been holding out on this one for a while.... here's to hoping I did alright!</p><p>Listen to 'Sadder' by Young Rising Suns or some other sad song while listening to this, it enhances the experience!</p><p>As always, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s been a week.</p><p>One week since Dream has started his lifelong sentence in prison. (He’s done for. This is it. Everything he worked so hard for, everything that he gave up, it’s all in vain.)</p><p>One week since everyone on the server confronted him and forced him to surrender. (Betrayal, hurt, anger, fear, regret, guilt)</p><p>One week since he’d seen the light of day. (He wonders if he’ll ever see it again.)</p><p>Sam doesn’t play games. That’s the reason why Dream had commissioned him specifically to construct the prison. It’s why Dream is bored out of his mind here, staring at the clock on the wall and watching time pass by ever-so-slowly.</p><p>(He’s lonely. There’s no one here but himself. Dream would love to be around anyone  but himself right now. Guilt and sadness and loneliness fester just below the surface, waiting to break into his head, and with nothing else to do, Dream finds himself letting it happen.)</p><p>Food is dispensed near his pool, twice a day. </p><p>It’s the same thing, every day. </p><p>For now, Dream relishes the taste of well-baked bread, if but a little stale. </p><p>(They probably don’t think he’s worth the effort of fresh, flavorful food, and he wonders at what point exactly he’ll grow tired of the taste).</p><p>He wears a dull orange jumpsuit, robbed of his hoodie. He feels naked and exposed, especially so now that he’s no longer hidden behind the daunting mask that everyone has grown to fear. </p><p>They’ve stripped him of his greatest weapon; his coverup. Now, his face is laid bare for all to see, and self-hatred is hard to avoid when he realizes he has no way of hiding his emotions now.</p><p>His royal flush has been torn from his grip, by the very pawns he’d puppeteered, and Dream laughs at the mutiny in spite of the way his bones ache with dread. </p><p>He’s at the mercy of the very people he’d made to hate him, and he knows that in due time, he’ll end up paying for it. </p><p>For now, though, he sits in his cell and awaits the impending storm.</p><p>His cell is bare-bones, which one might expect from such a high-security prison as this, and Dream quickly finds himself searching for something, anything, that can occupy his brain from the swirling storm inside his own head.</p><p>Most of the time, he stares at the clock. </p><p>It’s his only semblance of time in this black obsidian pit, and it seems to tick so much slower than a normal clock. </p><p>Maybe this is another way to torture him, to give him a feeling of solidity only for him to realize that it’s entirely fake. </p><p>The time is fake. It’s too slow. </p><p>How many days have gone by?</p><p>Are they watching from somewhere, some hidden hole, staring as he paces and stares at the walls and watches the clock?</p><p>(Something niggling at the back of his head says that’s all they’ve ever done, just sit and watch. It happened with Wilbur, it happened with Tommy, and now it’s happening to him.)</p><p>	Two weeks in, Dream gets his first visitor.</p><p>	Surprisingly, (or maybe not), it’s Tommy. His blonde hair flashes at him, and the annoying grin plastered to the child’s face is enough to make the familiar urge of bloodlust thrum through his veins once again.</p><p>	Tommy’s initial reaction at seeing his bare face for the first time is to scrunch up his nose like he’s just smelled something positively putrid and double over laughing, hounding at ‘how stupid you look!’</p><p>	(“How stupid you look!” Tommy shrieked, guffawing at the smiley face imprinted onto the wooden mask Dream wears. It’s his first day here, and Dream is already annoyed. “You look like a child’s toy!”)</p><p>	Dream does nothing. There’s nothing he can do anyways.</p><p>	“This is sad,” Tommy says. </p><p>	“It’s not too bad. I have the water, I can write, I can swim.” To emphasis his point, Dream throws himself into the lava, burning instantly, and respawning to fall into the same familiar pool of water, just like he has all the other times he’s died within this stupid prison.</p><p>	Tommy gives him a look that says he knows Dream is just trying to convince himself, and Dream hates how see-through he’s suddenly become.</p><p>	Sighing weakly, Dream exits his pool of water and watches as Tommy rifles through his chest, flipping the book pages at a glance, hoping to find some bit of writing worth his time. </p><p>	“You haven’t written in any of these?” Tommy asks, the mirth receding slowly from his face. His expression is unreadable when Dream responds.</p><p>	“Not yet, no.”</p><p>	“Well, why haven’t you?”</p><p>	“I just…. haven’t,” Dream finishes lamely, standing awkwardly near the center of the room. His hands lie fidgeting at his sides, tapping his thigh in a nervous tic he hasn’t had the weakness to show in years.</p><p>	“This is sad,” Tommy reiterates. </p><p>	“I’ll write,” Dream says without conviction. He makes no move to approach the lectern.</p><p>	“What will you write?” asks the boy, curious. </p><p>	It’s incredibly awkward between them, a twig of tension ready to snap at any given moment. There’s nothing for Dream to occupy his hands with, and he notices Tommy picking at the bandages around his knuckles anxiously.</p><p>	“I don’t know yet.” Dream leaves it at that, and the conversation lulls to a stop. </p><p>What else is there to say? He searches for something to talk about, something to cancel out the blanket of deafening silence the cell is wrapped in. But his head is incredibly empty, a dull buzzing in his ears, and it feels like he’s underwater when Tommy speaks again.</p><p>“Out of everyone on the server, who do you miss the most?” Tommy’s voice isn’t mocking this time, and Dream feels the world tilt to the side. “I’d miss Sapnap, prolly.”</p><p>He doesn’t answer, and the only sound in the cell is the crackling of the lava surrounding them.</p><p>“Who do you miss the most, Dream?’ Tommy asks again, like a parent asking a child, and something in Dream snaps.</p><p>“I think you should go, Tommy.”</p><p>“No – who do you miss the most?”</p><p>“Guard? Guard!” Dream shouts, ignoring the boy in front of him altogether. It’s better that way anyways. Thinking of missing people makes him feel sad, and feeling sad – feeling anything at all – is weak, weak, WEAK-</p><p>Dream is anything but weak.</p><p>Sam’s voice comes from who-knows-where, instructing Tommy to stand in the pool of water. The boy complies, albeit reluctantly, and Dream is alone again.</p><p>It’s better this way, he tells himself, and wills it to be true.</p><p>Weeks pass. Maybe it’s only days? Maybe it’s been a year.</p><p>Dream wouldn’t know. The clock doesn’t tell him things like that.</p><p>Tommy hasn’t visited since he gave Dream his “homework,” and Dream’s books lie empty and untouched, waiting.</p><p>Any time he looks at the blank pages, all he can think of is how his wooden mask matches in color. The parchment has the same beige hue, and it’s oh-so-easy to imagine the crooked, cruel smile placed on it.</p><p>Dream burns nearly all of the books right then and there.</p><p>It’s a testament to how bored out of his mind he is (or maybe just how lonely he’s become) that he chucks the clock into the lava almost ritually, just for Sam to enter his cell and give him some semblance of human interaction.</p><p>Though, it seems Sam has caught onto his new game, and Dream doesn’t suspect it’ll last much longer.</p><p>Nothing in his cell has changed. The same shroomlight hangs from his ceiling, the same lectern stands between his cauldron and the chest, and the same respawn pool glistens with light from the lava.</p><p>Dream used to spend his days sleeping, relishing in the undisturbed silence, but now it eats at him, crawling under his skin to rot, and the thought of even closing his eyes for more than a few seconds is enough to strike up a wave of anxiety.</p><p>The popping sound of a dispenser alerts him to a piece of day-old bread sitting by the respawn pool. Dream can’t bring himself to eat it, and instead tosses it into the lava like he does every day.</p><p>Hunger pangs at his stomach, but the thought of eating another nibble of bread staunches it immediately. Part of him regrets throwing the bread into the lava, but he knows that he’d never eat it anyways.</p><p>His cell has always been hot and humid, the constantly flowing lava made sure of that. Almost all of the time he finds himself tearing off his jumpsuit and stripping to his boxers, feeling confined by the clothing he’d been given.</p><p>He didn’t even get to wear his own clothes. His hoodie had been covered in little hidden pockets, and Dream curses Sam for his foresight. He probably would’ve escaped by now if he’d been able to keep it.</p><p>Sweating bullets, he lies flat on his back, ignoring how the rough obsidian feels like it’s burning welts into his skin, blistering the pale complexion. The pain is grounding. At least he knows it’s real.</p><p>There’s an infinite amount of time he’ll spend here, Dream thinks lazily. Eventually, the food will run out, and he’ll be left to rot with only the four walls of obsidian and a never-ending cascade of lava to keep him company.</p><p>Was Tommy’s visit even real? Was any of it ever real?</p><p>Is Sam real? Is the prison real? What if he’s just imagining this, the entire thing, and he’ll wake up in the morning to live another day tormenting the residents of that stupid nation.</p><p>Maybe that isn’t real either. What if it’s just Dream, sitting alone in some forest, out of his mind, dreaming up stories to keep himself entertained?</p><p>No, this isn’t some dream or figment of imagination. The obsidian is hot and it burns like boiling water. The lava pops and crackles. </p><p>His parched throat isn’t fake in the slightest, and Dream wonders if maybe the water he has in the cauldron is a trick, some way to torture him even more, because even though he drinks and drinks and drinks, it’s never enough, and within the minute his throat is cracked and dry again.</p><p>It’s come to the point where there’s a constant panging at the back of his head, whether from heat or lack of water or stress, Dream doesn’t know. Not that he cares much anyways.</p><p>He doesn’t care about a lot of things now, it seems.</p><p> </p><p>Dream’s just let his eyes flutter shut for what feels like the first time in days, only to snap wide open at the loud whirring of a machine starting.</p><p>	Even though he thought he’d crushed and pounded it into smithereens and then thrown it into the cascading lava, a flicker of unbidden hope ignites within his chest.</p><p>	Though muffled by the loud whirring, Dream can catch bits and pieces of a conversation between Sam and a voice so familiar it hurt.</p><p>	Then, the netherite blocks at the edge of the cell push upwards, and Dream watches the lava fall and Bad cross over on the floating bridge.</p><p>	Though he feels delighted to finally have company, there isn’t any denying the lethargy he feels behind his eyelids, nor the slowness with which he moves that most definitely isn’t the weakness or miner’s fatigue taking effect. </p><p>He stares with dull eyes as Bad finally arrives, waiting for the magma to fall back down before the blocks between them return to become part of the floor.</p><p>The air is awkward and tension-filled, brimming with words unspoken and festering wounds. There’s a thing, something, that sits in the air and blankets it with saccharine-sweet distrust.</p><p>“Hello,” Bad says, like it’s a normal day and he’s not visiting his ex-friend who backstabbed him and tried to imprison his best friend. Dream catches his gloved fingers trembling.</p><p>“Hi.” Dream says, because he doesn’t know whether to be relieved there’s someone here or sad that the person visiting him is so clearly afraid of him. </p><p>“Hi.” Bad repeats, glancing awkwardly at the lava as if wishing it could swallow him up and take him out of the cell.</p><p>“You’re the first visitor in a while.” And isn’t that just the truth. Dream doesn’t think he’s seen another person in months – not that he’d know for sure. His clock doesn’t track things like that and his sleep schedule is sporadic and uncoordinated – he could be asleep for two hours or an entire day, at this point.</p><p>“I am?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“Well, I mean- I haven’t visited you at all so I figured I would- I would come and stop by. Dream, how’re you doing?”</p><p>Dream pretends not to notice the painful stutter in his speech and the way he avoids eye contact. “I’ve been pretty good.”</p><p>It’s awkward, painfully so. Dream looks away from his guest and plays with the clock Sam had brought in again.</p><p>“I see you have a clock – to keep time. That’s pretty cool,” Bad says for the sake of conversation.</p><p>“I do.”</p><p>“What’re you doing?”</p><p>“Just- just playing with it.”</p><p>“Okay.” Bad looks greatly uncomfortable here. Dream recalls that the demon has a tremendous fear of places without an exit.</p><p>(he only knows this because Bad trusted him with the information, on a late night when they’d whispered secrets to each other, giggling with laughter, and Dream had filed it away in case he ever needed an advantage over the other man.)</p><p>The conversation lulls, just like it did with Tommy, and Dream makes no effort to rehash it.</p><p>“Is this what you do in your free time? This?”</p><p>Dream gets the feeling that Bad is trying to be his sort-of therapist, make him open up and talk about his feelings or whatever it is that functioning humans do.</p><p>Dream sighs, and a hint of sadness creeps into his voice. “Yeah. I used to write, but I burned a lot of my books, so.”</p><p>“Wait, you burned your books?” Bad asks incredulously. </p><p>Dream doesn’t blame him. The idea that he’d thrown out any semblance of entertainment in this bare-bones cell sounds preposterous to even him.</p><p>“Well, I have some, but I burnt a lot of them.” The last part comes out as a whisper, his voice giving out. He opens his chest to demonstrate.</p><p>“Oh- oh look, you’ve got a chest in here!” Bad says, like he’s talking to some five-year-old, looking into the chest. “Oh, you have a lot of books! See, this isn’t so bad, is it? I mean, how’re you doing? Do you like it in here?”</p><p>There’s a pause. Dream debates telling him to leave if he’s just going to gloat about his misery, but realizes that he’s being genuine, and replies with: “Yeah, it’s really good.”</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>Then Dream realizes that Bad’s not going to try and start up the conversation again, which means he’ll leave. For some reason, the thought strikes fear in his heart. </p><p>Desperate, he says, “Um, I get potatoes.”</p><p>Bad seems to sense what he’s trying to do, and responds approvingly. “There you go. Potatoes are good.”</p><p>“But they’re raw, so they’re not very good. But-“</p><p>“They don’t cook them?” Bad interrupts, and for the first time in a while he seems genuinely concerned for Dream.</p><p>“They don’t,” Dream says, and he’s quick to change the subject. “He said- I tried to get out and he made it so I couldn’t have visitors for a few days, but….”</p><p>“Aww, I’m sorry,” Bad says sympathetically. “I mean, you did do a lot of stuff- that you probably shouldn’ta done that got you in here, so… I mean, there’s that.”</p><p>“That’s true,” Dream says, looking away as something ugly swells, festering in his chest. He doesn’t want it there. He doesn’t want any of this. The awkward tension, the nervous way Bad fiddles with his fingers and looks anywhere but at him – all of it.</p><p>For lack of anything else to say, because sorry will never, ever, ever fix what’s he done to the people around him, he repeats himself. “That’s true.”</p><p>“I mean,” Bad starts, and Dream feels a tug of annoyance somewhere in his head at how often his visitor says it. “I bet you have a lot of time, ya know, to think about what you did.”</p><p>It’s true, he does have time. A lot. Most of which he spends trying to occupy himself with anything other than that. </p><p>“Yeah, I do. Lots of time to think, and think, and think-“ Dream cuts himself off. “And play with my clock.”</p><p>Bad seems surprised, if not a little sad, that George and Sapnap haven’t visited yet, but Dream knows that there’s nothing waiting for them here. He’s not worth their time, much less their attention.</p><p>When prompted, Bad seems hesitant to talk about outside affairs, like there’s something he doesn’t want Dream to know about. Dream wonders what it is, and utterly hates himself for the fact that part of him files that information away for later.</p><p>“What’s going on with everything else?” Dream asks, and Bad stutters a little before replying.</p><p>“There’s still that giant crater where L’Manberg used to be, uhh, yeah.”</p><p>Dream doesn’t appreciate the reminder of yet another crime he’s committed against the nation. He’s surprised to hear that the egg is still growing, though considering Bad’s inherent infatuation with it he can’t say he was caught off-guard.</p><p>Dream writes him a book with a thank-you note in it, despite the fact that Bad can’t take it out of the cell, and his mood falls flat when Bad asks if he could take it out when Dream’s sentence ends.</p><p>“How long is your sentence, Dream?”</p><p>“Oh, uh, it’s forever.”</p><p>“Ohhf…” Bad says, cringing. He tries to mask it with thinly applied positivity, and it sounds more like he’s trying to convince himself than Dream. “Forever’s not that long!”</p><p>Dream just scoffs.</p><p>When Bad leaves, though Dream could no longer feel anything towards his once-best-friend but indifference (that’s a lie, it’s a lie, you’re LYING), a small (large) part of him is sad. </p><p>The only human contact he’s had in weeks, months, - who knows? - and then it’s gone like that.</p><p>Dream wonders if it was ever real to begin with.</p><p>Even though he spoke with Bad for what must’ve been only twenty minutes (he wouldn’t know, he chucked the clock back into the lava, watched it smolder in the hot acidic flame) Dream finds his throat sore, vocal chords stretched beyond their limits.</p><p>The lack of hydration was a good portion of it, but Dream knows deep within that it’s a sign of how long he’s gone without speaking that the first few words he tries to say don’t make sound, and how utterly wrecked his voice is when he finally manages to get his vocal chords working.</p><p>Needless to say, after the tension and nervousness of the visit, Dream feels as far from human as he had been during the wars and much closer to the worn-down, destroyed country of L’Manberg.</p><p>Dream lies down on the solid black obsidian, using his arms as a cushion for his head, and sleep captures him easily. His rest is filled with images of a crestfallen Tommy at the beach, Wilbur pressing the button, and Punz chanting “You should’ve paid me more,” over and over and OVER-</p><p>Dream wakes, feeling the same as he had before he’d shut his eyes, if not worse. The clock on his wall remains missing, and Dream longs, not for the first time, for some semblance of how long he’s been in this damned cell.</p><p>The clicking of the food dispenser reminds him to throw out another piece of staling bread, even as hunger desperately claws at his stomach.</p><p>Finding the strength to stand takes more time than Dream should be comfortable with, but for some inexplicable reason he can’t find it in himself to care. When he does stand, the world feels off-balance, tilted on its axis, and he barely takes a few weakened steps before he’s collapsed on the ground again.</p><p>Maybe, just maybe, he should call Sam for help. </p><p>Alarm bells blare somewhere in the back of his head, but they’re muted, like it’s music playing in another room. He feels the air escape his lungs, and it’s in a peaceful sort of way that he realizes his vision growing spotty and- Oh. </p><p>He hasn’t breathed in a few seconds.</p><p>Sam wouldn’t listen anyways. He knows by now that anything Dream says is just a ploy for attention, some sense of human interaction, albeit meagre, stiff and cold. </p><p>There’s no one to help him now. Dream was a fool to think there ever was.</p><p>When Dream awakens, he’s greeted with the same red hue cast over the cell walls, the same scorching heat that sears his skin into sweating bullets, the same items bolted to the floor of his cell.</p><p>Absolutely nothing has changed. Absolutely nothing changes, and it never will.</p><p>Dream should feel sad because of that. He should feel angry and sad and upset about it, about that realization, but instead all he feels is tired.</p><p>He’s just woken up and he’s already spent just thinking about moving. His limbs are weighed down with an invisible weight, and his mind is muddled and foggy like the forest in the morning.</p><p>Breathing feels like a chore. Thinking feels like a chore. Everything feels like it’s taxing his body, even when it’s not physical. </p><p>Look at you, some voice in his head whispers. You’re pathetic. You’ve become weak. You’ve let yourself go, and now you can’t even get up off of the floor.</p><p>Dream agrees with it. He is weak and pathetic and anything but strong. </p><p>When was it that he’d become this way? Numb to everything? The heat of the obsidian on his back is burning his skin, pervading in his lungs like he’s some forty-year-old smoker, and he couldn’t care less.</p><p>He thinks about everything and nothing all at once. Words pouring tumultuously around his head, rattling off the edges, and it feels foggy and heavy like his thoughts have actual weight to them in the physical realm.</p><p>There’s no reason to stand. </p><p>Dream lies there for who knows how long. His mouth is dry, the heat is slowly melting him, and Dream just – he just lies there, given up, accepted his fate.</p><p>There’s no getting out of here, there never was. Dream knows Sam well enough to know that when he said it was inescapable he meant it. And if Sam knows of no escape route, then there isn’t one.</p><p>What would be the point anyway? Escape the prison, cause more chaos?</p><p>Dream doesn’t think it’d be quite as fun as it had been. He remembers the euphoria of the pure mayhem he’d cause, the unadulterated ecstasy that thrummed in his veins when Tommy was finally exiled.</p><p>Now, though, it just sounds…. boring. A waste of his time. Trivial, really. </p><p>Dream’s never getting out, and there’s no reason for him to even try. He can spend the rest of eternity, rotting here, waiting.</p><p>That is, he does, until Tommy arrives again demanding answers.</p><p>The lava falls gently and excruciatingly slowly, but Dream can’t be bothered to greet him at the netherite blocks, waiting for them to be pushed down and for the boy to enter his cell.</p><p>No, instead Dream lies on the floor like he’s been doing for…. how long? Hours? Days? Dream hasn’t even bothered to see if he has a clock, or even the time as he is. </p><p>There’s no point. </p><p>Time is infinite when there’s nowhere to go.</p><p>“Oi, bitch,” Tommy starts, and the part of Dream that hasn’t given up yet cackles that oh, this is going to be interesting. </p><p>Dream barely has the energy to open his eyes, at this rate. He hasn’t eaten in….. how would he know? He keeps his eyes shut as Tommy speaks again.</p><p>“Get up, bitch.” </p><p>It sounds as if he’s trying to get a reaction out of Dream. </p><p>Attitude, some sort of punishment for insulting his superior, forcing Tommy to drop all of his belongings in a hole just like how it was in Logstedshire. </p><p>Except this time, the roles are reversed, and Dream can’t stare at lava wondering if he should make the jump. </p><p>Because in here, in this damned hellion, there is no permanent death, not unless it’s by a warden.</p><p>Dream is doomed to respawn and respawn and respawn again until Sam just finally does the job for him. He thinks maybe Tommy had a better opportunity than he could’ve thought.</p><p>“Say something.” A tinge of desperation leaks into Tommy’s voice, like a droplet of water from a dam. There’s a shove at his side, then, and at his lack of response even then, Tommy kicks him in the side.</p><p>“Oh, that felt good,” Tommy chides, like he’s just won the lottery. </p><p>A compliant Dream lying conveniently on the ground, practically catatonic in his state. Tommy must be positively slobbering at the thought of how much power he holds over his past abuser now.</p><p>And yet, Tommy still has something he wants from Dream, and Dream knows he’ll sit and wait to take his manipulator out until he gets that thing.</p><p>Another kick, into his ribs this time, has a gasp of air leaving his lungs, and his eyes flutter open just a smidge. Tommy is grinning over him, teeth and all, like he knew Dream had just been ignoring him all along.</p><p>“So you’re not dead.” The grin is manic on his face as Tommy leans over him, and Dream gives into the tug of sleep on his eyes.</p><p>Yet another sharp jab to his ribs. Dream’s wondering if Tommy’s just visited to beat the snot out of him or if he’d come to redeem the token of Dream’s freeloading.</p><p>When Dream doesn’t respond, Tommy huffs an annoyed sigh and though Dream still has his eyes closed he can practically hear the way the boy picks at the bandages that constantly litter his arms and legs, listen to the nervous fidgeting he has never fully been able to hide as he cards a hand through his hair.</p><p>It’s startling, how much Dream still knows about Tommy. He wonders if even Tubbo can match him for how many things he knows about the boy in question. </p><p>Does he know that Tommy has a scar, long-healed, on his forehead, just underneath the flop of bangs? Does he know how utterly sad Tommy was when no one shows up to the beach party? </p><p>Tubbo couldn’t know. Not like Dream knows. </p><p>Because Dream knows everything about everyone. Weaknesses, strengths, any possible assets that can be used to an advantage to do his bidding or a disadvantage to take them down if they get in his way.</p><p>Dream hates that he took the time to know everyone, anyone, so intimately just for the sheer sake of having the upper hand. The manipulator in him strokes his ego because he still has so much power, even locked up in this dark, dingy cell. </p><p>The other side feels poisoned, sickly, as it watches Dream analyze everything and everyone with a cold, calculated filter, as if all he sees when he looks at something is how he can use them to his advantage, as if he’s the king and they’re the little pawn in his schemes.</p><p>“How do we revive Wilbur?” Tommy asks in a tone that sounds like he’s asked it multiple times. Annoyed, and angry. </p><p>Dream is torn between punching the teen hard enough to break something and sobbing out an apology. </p><p>He settles for neither, in the end.</p><p>“Look, bitch, unlike you I have important things to do,” Tommy says, like that’ll make Dream feel sympathetic and spill all the secrets Schlatt told him behind closed doors. “If you don’t tell me now, you’re just gonna rot here for the rest of your pathetic, manipulator life, you bastard.”</p><p>Dream can imagine the sneer on Tommy’s face, pure anger etched into every line and crevice in a way Dream has seen more than anyone else.</p><p>It’s with great effort that Dream slowly opens his eyes, staring at Tommy with a half-lidded, distant gaze. “And if I do?” he croaks, throat burning at the sensation of vocal chords grating after so long being dormant.</p><p>Tommy’s eyes widen at the sound, like he’d given up, like he wasn’t expecting Dream to talk.</p><p>“If I do tell you, you’re just going to kill me after. I lose either way, Tommy.”</p><p>He chuckles a little at the irony. The captor become captive, hunter-turned-prey. It burns his throat like a beesting.</p><p>Dream waits for the words to sink in, watches that little light that’s managed to gain a foothole in Tommy’s eyes crumble just a little. </p><p>“If you came here for answers, you’re not getting them. Goodbye, Tommy.”</p><p>His throat is burning, and it feels like he’s a dormant volcano that’s just erupted, hot bits of lava streaking down his throat and burning everything it touches. He couldn’t say more if he tried, and Tommy doesn’t say anything after.</p><p>Dream doesn’t even bother to watch Tommy leave. There’s no point. Watch him die from the instant harm potion, and what? Cackle with joy, like he did before? Look on in amusement?</p><p>There’s no point. </p><p>There’s no point to any of this.</p><p>The only reason they’re even keeping him alive right now is because they need information out of him and Dream’s been tight-lipped about it. He wonders how long this schtick will last, them begging and begging and Dream denying and denying.</p><p>Somehow, someway, Dream’s found control even as he withers away, gone from human contact and vanquished from society like some kind of freak of nature. If his cruelty were a manifestation, it’d be an accurate description.</p><p>Here, Dream has control. He has everything he ever wanted. He has the key to everyone’s happiness, because everyone wants to know how to revive those who have died and not come back.</p><p>He is in control. </p><p>Isn’t that what he’s wanted, all along? Something to hold over another’s head, something he can use as leverage to whatever advantage he wants.</p><p>And here it is, the very key to it all, lying within relics of the past and a man who’d done more harm to his kidneys before he had a chance to harm others. </p><p>Schlatt was an idiot, whether it be because of the drinking or the way he went about politics. He was sloppy, and it got him killed in the end. But he’d found out the secret to life after death, and Dream knew that was invaluable to all.</p><p>Knowledge is power, and Dream has the entire deck of trump cards within his grasp.</p><p>Dream has everything.</p><p>And yet….. </p><p>And yet, there’s a sense of incompletion that rings in the air. It fills his chest with undying fervor, an ache that no power or control can ever heal. It reminds Dream that he is human, a fact that he both loves and hates at the same time.</p><p>Dream has everything, and yet he finds himself missing the long nights with George and Sapnap, back when it was just him and them, building the community house without a care in the world. Misses the harsh bark of laughter Tommy would display when a prank went awry.</p><p>But most of all, he misses the simple things, like how grass would feel on his bare feet or the way the sun felt on his skin, warming him in a way that doesn’t fill his lungs with suffocating heat or burn his nerves. </p><p>He misses the feel of fresh pond water, wading in it as Sapnap and George fight in the distance. </p><p>It’s incredibly human, and directly after there’s a split second where if Dream could have found an opportunity to permanently kill himself, he would’ve taken it.</p><p>Being human is weak. Dream is not weak. Caring is weak.</p><p>And yet, he is. </p><p>Attachment makes him weak, but he is not strong without something to fight for.</p><p>The only thing he’d fought for was his own drive for entertainment, to see the world burn, and look where that got him. Locked away in a cell, holding all the cards but still finding his hand being forced.</p><p>Dream has everything, and yet he has nothing.</p><p>That night, he does something he hasn’t done in years (he knows this for a fact, because he hadn’t done it for years even before being locked away).</p><p>Dream cries.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Subscribing? Giving kudos? Commenting? </p><p>I will TOTALLY not appreciate it if you do. SMH, how could you think otherwise? S'not like it gives me motivation or anything...</p><p>Thanks for reading! </p><p>-Love, asy &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Wish Upon A Star (Wonder Where You Are)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>“How do we revive Wilbur?” Someone snarls. Dream doesn’t know who, doesn’t care to focus enough to discern who’s saying what and what’s going where. </p><p>His eyes shut resignedly, mouth pressed into a thin line, and there’s no mistaking the harsh growl the gesture elicits. </p><p>“Why don’t we just kill him already?” Another person says, terse with impatience. “He’s never gonna tell us at this point.”</p><p>(Or, Dream is forced to face his old friends and the result is less than happy)</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>To all of you who received a chapter update and are confused, let me explain:</p><p>-first, i apologize for the rushed chapter from before, I made a grave error in judgement (and to make up for that, enjoy 600 more words!)<br/>-second, i had to fix up some errors that were accidentally forgotten, i. e. the bridge between person A's visit and person B's visit.</p><p>first published on [02/10/2021], edited on [02/11/2021]</p><p>anyways, to those of you who haven't read it yet, i hope you enjoy 6k words of misery.</p><p>{'Itsy Bitsy' by Lyn Lapids &amp; 'Guillotine' by 8 Graves work really well for music in this chapter. Alternatively, listen to just anything with sadder vibes}</p><p>thanks for reading! sorry for the long note. love, asy &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dream wakes up with an ache in his chest, eyelids droopy and the dirty feeling of teartracks lingers on his cheeks.</p><p>His mouth is dry and thick, like he’s just awoken from hours upon hours of slumber, though he couldn’t have been asleep for much longer than three at best.</p><p>It’s the kind of tiredness and emotional exhaustion that one can only receive from crying for hours on end, and Dream hates the sluggishness with which he rises, ignoring the fatigue that plagues him, and walks over to the small cauldron he has.</p><p>The water is lukewarm as he splashes it on his face, heated by the lava even though it’s as far away from it as possible in this cramped, tiny cell. </p><p>Dream ignores the uncomfortable feeling of water dripping off of his chin and scrubs his face a bit more vigorously than necessary.</p><p>Where did this sudden feeling of guilt come from? This weakness, this stupidly human emotion that has now suddenly made him hate himself for an entirely different reason than he already had. </p><p>It’s intoxicating, it is. He feels the dread and sorrow fester deep within his chest, as if every breath is polluted with it.</p><p>He’s stuck on this endless loop of waking up and living and existing, just to fall asleep hours, sometimes days later, only to wake up and start the process again. </p><p>Dream’s always hated repetitive things – it’s why he couldn’t stand Tommy just as well as he could with his other friends enemies, it’s why Wilbur’s reign had to end as it did, why he’s despised L’Manberg from the beginning.</p><p>It’s the same, over and over and over and OVER-</p><p>Dream wonders if when the cycle will end.</p><p>Oh. He’s still at the cauldron.</p><p>It takes an absurdly long amount of time for Dream to release his iron grip on the edge, and his fingers are sore as he stretches them to ease out the kinks.</p><p>Geez, who know that even after…. however long it’s been since he’s eaten, Dream still has the strength to hold something in a grip of vice.</p><p>As if reminded by the thought, his stomach cramps so painfully that Dream is almost brought to his knees, tears in his eyes. </p><p>The pain makes him slouch over himself, worried that standing straight will just hurt more, and he slowly sinks to the floor in defeat.</p><p>There’s the harsh popping sound of the dispenser going off. </p><p>Dream makes no move to go to it, yet again. The bread falls into a steadily molding pile, and he would’ve used that as a way to track time if he knew how long it took for bread to grow rotten.</p><p>Instead, Dream doubles over in nausea at the sudden thought of the food, curling up to lie on the floor.</p><p>Pathetic, something malicious within him whispers. You’re going to starve to death, and then what? Respawn? There’s no escape here.</p><p>Well, there is one, but it seems Dream is already going along that path, so there’s not much to be done about it.</p><p>Another stomach cramp tightens in whatever remnants of muscle he might have, and Dream lets out an involuntary cry.</p><p>His stomach acid is eating him up, from the inside out, and it’s not going to stop until his body doesn’t create it anymore.</p><p>It hurts so much.</p><p>Tears enter his eyes as the pain. This is torture, he thinks, only to realize that this – this solitary confinement, this hot, boring cell – it’s all torture, for him. </p><p>Fighting nausea as he crawls over to the old, moldy pile of bread, Dream shoves the topmost piece in his mouth, nearly forgetting to chew, just trying to get something, anything into his stomach, just please, make it STOP-</p><p>He doesn’t experience taste as he crams in another loaf, and another, until the pile is gone and his body is seizing and he vomits it all up, covering the rough obsidian with an ugly pool of brown.</p><p>Desperation flows through his veins as he vomits again, and again, and again, and it feels like there’s no end to it. His body is rejecting the sudden influx in substance and treating it like bacteria because it’s still in starvation mode and – he really didn’t think this through.</p><p>He hadn’t banked on this. He’d only felt the frantic hunger claw at his stomach and raw, primal desperation sink into his being as he stared at the pile of bread.</p><p>There’s only one end to it, and he’s looking at it, watching as it sparks and bubbles as it slowly tumbles downward, forming an incredibly hot, incredibly thick wall between him and freedom.</p><p>(or at least he thinks, because Dream had been unconscious when they’d brought him in here and he’s never been outside of the cell)</p><p>Dream hasn’t done it since that first week of being in captivity, back when his sleep schedule could properly handle the time and he kept his logic closer than a lover. </p><p>It’s with great difficulty he rises, and it’s even harder when there’s still vomit erupting from within his chest every few moments. Dream stumbles over and into the lava, letting the corroding burn sear into his skin and tear it apart. </p><p>It hurts, it burns, it’s unlike any other pain he could ever feel, something he’s intimately familiar with, and then he’s cold again, falling into the lukewarm pool of water (that’s steadily growing hot as time wears on, heating to the same temperature as everything else in this god-forsaken place) and hoisting himself out of it.</p><p>The droplets on his skin soon turn from a comfort to a curse as the heat slowly humidifies them, a wet blanket to throw across his shoulders and cover him with uncomfortable hot moisture.</p><p>Dream finds himself lying on the floor, just the same as any other day. He hasn’t the energy to stay awake much longer, even though his hunger bars have returned to full.</p><p>His eyelids slip closed, and sleep overtakes him.</p><p>When Dream awakes, the world is hazy, like he’s staring at it through a foggy lens. </p><p>Groggily, he dredges up the last vestiges of energy unreplenished and sits up, staring at the wall of tumbling lava like it’s the most intricate and detailed portrait in the world.</p><p>His cell is clean again, and his jumpsuit is robbed of any stains his refuse would’ve left. </p><p>It feels like he hasn’t slept in days, even if he’s just woken up. </p><p>The world is tilted on its axis, and Dream can’t shake the feeling that something is off-kilter, in a way he can’t even begin to fathom, much less describe.</p><p>He sits there, staring at the lava, and remains like that for several hours (or so he guesses).</p><p>Time is infinite here. </p><p>He’s stuck in a perpetual limbo, lost to the world outside. </p><p>All that exists is he and his four walls; three of stark, solid obsidian and the fourth constructed of hot, sizzling mass that hurts his eyes to look at and burns his skin even at the back of his cell.</p><p>What is finite, in this bleak and isolated place? </p><p>What exists here that will not exist until the end of time? </p><p>Even the molding bread by which he sits will crumble to dust that will settle within the room long after Dream dies.</p><p>(Because surely that respawn anchor can’t go on for forever – there has to be a limit at which it will reach, a breath he will take that will unknowingly be his last, and then Dream will finally feel bliss)</p><p>Well. Isn’t that quite the conundrum? </p><p>The only thing that has a time limit here is Dream himself.</p><p>After what feels like hours later, the lava fall comes to a halt, sinking down to the ground where it pools, waiting like a hungry predator for just one wrong move, one faulty step, to consume whatever fell into it.</p><p>Dream takes a long, hard look at the dispensers positioned klicks above him, molded into the ceiling and somehow containing the harsh, searing liquid that boxes him within this hellion of a home.</p><p>Sapnap crosses over on the moving bridge with fearful hesitancy, his face a confliction of distrust, fear, and skittishness that Dream would only see masked by anger and a fiery snarl – first directed at enemies, gradually directed at him.</p><p>Dream’s a bit surprised that Sapnap is laying himself bare before him, being as expressive as he was back before the wars, back when they were friends. But Dream knows Sapnap, or at least knew him before, so the façade wouldn’t have worked anyways.</p><p>“Hello?” is what Sapnap greets him with, like he’s not sure Dream’s there or not. </p><p>Dream just looks at him, then to his clock, and fiddles with it idly as Sapnap talks.</p><p>It hurts, to seem him like this. Dream doesn’t speak to him, choosing instead to tear a page out of one of his books and write out an answer, under the excuse of being ‘on strike,’ left cryptically for Sapnap to figure out himself.</p><p>(Bile rises in the back of his throat at the color of the parchment, but Dream forces himself to ignore it like he ignores everything else and continue on like nothing’s wrong)</p><p>They talk. More like, Sapnap talks and Dream writes responses occasionally. It’s strange and awkwardly comfortable, how easy it is to slip back into conversation like there’d never been an entire war waged between them, like there hadn’t been months of radio silence and explosive anger leading up to their split-up.</p><p>It’s so easy. Too easy, frighteningly so.</p><p>Sapnap fits together with Dream like the pieces to a puzzle, and the months without the younger have left him feeling missing and incomplete. Sapnap being here, talking with him like they’d never parted, brings back a nostalgic and bittersweet feeling that’s all too familiar and new at the same time.</p><p>It’s scary. Dream has never had someone that knows him as intimately and well as Sap, and he, him. Sapnap knows his tells like he knows his sword, and there will never ever be any hiding with him – and because of that, because he is how he is, well-</p><p>Dream is scared that Sapnap will see him break.</p><p>Dream asks him to deliver a message to Ranboo, just a simple, idiotic smile – cryptic and explaining and frustrating all in one. </p><p>He hates his knack for that.</p><p>Sap’s gone far too soon and yet not fast enough, and Dream lingers on the edge of yearning for his friend to stay with him and getting as far away from here as possible.</p><p>The dark, possessive half of him wants Sapnap to himself, to hold him down and bind him to this cell like Dream is, to be his, all his, just like the SMP, just like the discs, just like Tommy-</p><p>Dream shuts that thought off, burying it in the deepest crevices of his mind he can fathom, and instead thinks about how much he misses the feeling of the sun on his skin.</p><p>Dream watches as Sam approaches on the floating bridge, still sitting in his waking position. He makes no move to greet the warden, even after the netherite blocks return to their resting spot.</p><p>But instead of routinely inspecting the cell as Sam is ought to do at unexpected intervals, or even to replace the clock that Dream hasn’t even bothered to check if it’s there or not, he marches right up to Dream’s prone body, netherite sword that gleams sharpness enchants in one hand and in the other a sickly-looking potion that can only mean one thing.</p><p>In one moment, Dream inhales, and in the next, he opens his tired eyelids to the inside of a small and compact box made of stolid, iron walls and unmoving, angry eyes. </p><p>There are many people surrounding him, garned to the teeth with glimmering netherite, and Dream would feel flattered at the level of seriousness they take him at if not for the utter apathy coursing through his veins, clouding his thoughts, filling his every breath and telling him what a waste of oxygen it is.</p><p>From what his limited view can offer, Dream guesses that most of the server is here, if not all. It explains why he’s outside, in this tiny box instead of cornered in his cell – there’s not enough room for all of them to get a good look at how pathetic he is there. </p><p>That, and the fact that Sam doesn’t allow more than one visitor in the cell at a time.</p><p>Mining fatigue pulls at his limbs, so Dream doesn’t move. Just sits and stares, like he’d done in the prison. </p><p>Apparently, this angers people, because there’s a loud swearing noise somewhere to the left and out of sight, and the players that had been surrounding the box from afar come nearer, teeth bared and sneers present.</p><p>“How do we revive Wilbur?” Someone snarls. Dream doesn’t know who, doesn’t care to focus enough to discern who’s saying what and what’s going where. </p><p>His eyes shut resignedly, mouth pressed into a thin line, and there’s no mistaking the harsh growl the gesture elicits. </p><p>“Why don’t we just kill him already?” Another person says, terse with impatience. “He’s never gonna tell us at this point.”</p><p>A long time ago, riling someone up would’ve been the jam to Dream’s bread, the crème de la crème of his day. </p><p>The old Dream, from before his imprisonment, would’ve laughed and chided and egged it on, milking the taste of getting underneath someone’s skin.</p><p>Now, all it does is remind him that there are other things surrounding him than walls and his own thoughts. </p><p>A slight breeze passes through whatever airway may be present in this makeshift cell and Dream greedily takes a moment to relish the feeling of cool air on his skin. Soaking it in like a sponge to water, he ignores the sound of armor clanking as someone shifts impatiently.</p><p>Who knows when he’ll feel it again? </p><p>Probably never, especially after (if) he tells them how to bring back their beloved brother and friend, who almost murdered an entire nation but is still somehow considered a good person.</p><p>(and if Dream resented that fact, then so be it. He thinks after all that he’s been through he deserves at least that much, or maybe he’s just deluding himself into another justification for ruining yet another person’s life, because he always and forever will be – he just doesn’t know who’s it is quite yet)</p><p>So, he doesn’t feel an ounce of regret or shame or guilt at enjoying his limited time out of his cell, even as the barbed edge of a weapon grazes his throat and rests there, a threat to account for his silence.</p><p>“Tell us how to revive Wilbur or you’re dead,” a voice spits at him, leaking malice, and it’s hard to misplace the sheer ire Dream can feel radiating off of the person in front of him. </p><p>Only one person would hate him this much for this, and only one person speaks with such monotone even as they’re threatening another.</p><p>They have Techno with them. </p><p>Of course, the only force stronger than him on this server would succumb to creating connections with other members – particularly those of Wilbur (or ‘Ghostbur,’ as they had taken to calling him), Tommy, and the notorious Philza Minecraft.</p><p>It’s the very thing Before-Dream had laughed at him for, teased and mocked and heckled the man because of, but look where that got him. Locked behind heavy iron blocks with an axe at his throat.</p><p>The axe presses further into Dream’s throat, just enough to cut into the flesh and ignite a steady stream of hot blood to trickle out, but nothing more. It’s a reminder to Dream that for all his games, no one is playing around here.</p><p>Speaking has always been rough since Dream’s impromptu incarceration, what with the sudden lack of people to speak to, and the words lodge in his throat as his vocal chords struggle to cooperate. </p><p>He wonders if the others understand this difficulty, because even though the axe is still pressed neatly against his throat, the pressure on it lessens just the smallest bit.</p><p>“M- Might as well kill me then,” he finally forces out, hoarse and abused, because what is there to live for, at this point? </p><p>His future is bleak. Tell them, and they kill him. </p><p>Don’t tell them, and they kill him. </p><p>Perhaps, he could be The Good Sinner and whisper Schlatt’s secret into his murderer’s ear as a parting gift – if he’s even spared the formality of last words, that is.</p><p>The air is silent and tense as the axe remains unfalteringly placed against his throat. Hushed whispers sound from somewhere around him, and Dream can tell it’s an argument based off of the harsh, quick speed and the curt tone they carry.</p><p>In the meantime, while they make their decision, Dream gazes out the small window in which he can see out of – the space that isn’t currently occupied by Technoblade – and tries to memorize every detail that he can.</p><p>It’s only a glimpse of the same blue sky and the same green trees that he’s see a million times before, but Dream still latches onto it like a lifeline. He’ll probably never see them again, with how things are going, and he doesn’t ever want to forget what shade of green the earth is.</p><p>Dream doesn’t want to admit that it’d been forgotten behind the walls of that cell long ago.</p><p>The sound of breaking glass meets his ears, and when Dream comes into consciousness he’s back in that bleak, black cell again.</p><p>From the way he feels all of his limbs and a decidedly still beating heart, Dream deducts that he’s still alive. </p><p>He doesn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed upon realizing that fact.</p><p>Dream chooses not to dwell on it.</p><p>He’s still living and breathing, which means that whatever arguing happened while Dream was knocked out hadn’t come to a conclusion. </p><p>Or maybe it had, and they decided to let him rot for eternity in this hell instead of the sweet reprieve death would bring.</p><p>His dispenser’s already popped out a piece of food, but after his last experience eating it, Dream just throws it into the lava again.</p><p>He doesn’t do much after that. </p><p>The clock, though replaced, doesn’t hold as much appeal as it once did. Dream finds himself lying down on the hot obsidian with his jumpsuit off and tears fogging in his eyes.</p><p>There’s a certain bit of clarity in which he thinks about what all’s happened to get him here, lying alone in a dimly lit dungeon with only four walls and his thoughts to accompany him.</p><p>He’d started wars, manipulated multiple people, and even gone so far as to exile and murder mere children. Cut his connections, begun hoarding objects by which he could use as means to control everyone. </p><p>Pure fear rises up amidst the murky apathy swirling in his chest. At what point would he have gone to get what he wanted? </p><p>If no one would have been able to stop him, just exactly how far was he planning on taking things?</p><p>He’d already manipulated a child into choosing between his most prized possessions and his closest friends, what more could he have done?</p><p>The thought runs rampant in his head. If he’d somehow managed to escape, he very obviously wouldn’t have stayed away. </p><p>The old Dream didn’t operate like that. He had to have someone to manipulate, to control. Someone he could mold into the shape of whatever he wished they would be. Like a piece of clay.</p><p>Dream doesn’t know if he still operates like that. He doesn’t even know if he’s any different from the ‘old Dream’. </p><p>Is he any better than the man who slaughtered for the fun of it? Caused pain and terror and traumatized people for the rest of their lives for mere entertainment?</p><p>Is there anything keeping him from doing it again, other than these unbreakable, bare walls?</p><p>There’s bile rising in his throat, and Dream finds himself vomiting nothing but stomach acid on the floor. He gags and vomits until there is nothing more in his stomach to possibly get out, and even afterwards his body still convulses angrily.</p><p>He thinks that if he’d eaten that slice of bread earlier this might not have happened, and the thought of eating drives him over the edge again. Dream throws himself into the lava to avoid more empty gagging.</p><p>The pains in his stomach satiate, and he respawns in his new body feeling like someone had weighed a sack of bricks on his eyelids.</p><p>The feeling of lukewarm water on his body is uncomfortable as Dream crawls out of the water pool, dripping wet.</p><p>It’s suffocating, this stagnant air that is somehow both humid and dry at the same time.</p><p>He lies back down on the scalding obsidian, as he did any other day.</p><p>Everything is the same.</p><p>Nothing will ever change.</p><p>What’s the point?</p><p>Dream almost wishes that there hadn’t been an argument while he was outside. He wishes that Technoblade had listened to the people in his head named Chat, and finally just ended this stupid, pointless misery once and for all.</p><p>Dream can try and kill himself all he wants here. </p><p>He’ll respawn every single time because he’s supposed to sit and rot, not find the coward’s way out. They still need him alive, and Dream will stay alive until they can’t find a use for him anymore and cast him into the fire like he should’ve been back when they were inside his lair, holding him at sword-point.</p><p>Hours pass. This, Dream knows, because when he’s entered his cell he’d found that the clock had been returned to its rightful place on the wall.</p><p>He’s still tempted with the urge to throw it into the lava, rile Sam up. Anything to get a human interaction that’s slightly less negative than all of the others he’d dealt with.</p><p>Not that Sam’s all that expressive, anyways. He takes his duty seriously and Dream would probably die for the final time before that fact ever changes.</p><p>When he wakes (when had he been asleep?), he’s greeted with the sight of two people standing over him, and if looks could kill, he’d be dead a million times over.</p><p>Sapnap is adorned in his customary netherite, glimmering maliciously as its wearer watches him with a gaze of fire, bright and angry. An axe of diamond is wielded in his right hand, polished shield in the other.</p><p>Sam obviously did not know of their presence in his cell.</p><p>Beside him stands George, wearing nothing but his normal clothing and an achingly familiar leather helmet. His face is placid and even, seemingly bored, but Dream still knows him, still knows his ex-friend, and can see the uncertainty wavering within.</p><p>In another time, Dream would’ve used that insight to his advantage, tossed them around like ragdolls, puppeteered them like the little marionettes he had spent so long crafting them into.</p><p>Instead, Dream rises slowly, blinking sleep out of his eyes as his once-friends instinctively shift away. Again, he is reminded of the power he holds within his grasp, even as he lies on the floor, completely at their mercy.</p><p>There’s a bit of silence that lingers, a sort of tension that would set Dream on edge if it weren’t for the tiredness that plagues him night and day, even though from the way his mouth feels thick and dry suggests he’d been sleeping for too long.</p><p>Sapnap and George look at him like they expect him to start talking. Dream doesn’t.</p><p>What’s he supposed to say? Say sorry, and everything goes back to normal? </p><p>He almost scoffs at himself for that thought. </p><p>Sorry doesn’t make all the pain go away. Sorry doesn’t restore L’Manberg to its former glory. Sorry doesn’t fix anything.</p><p>They remain like that for what feels like hours. Something ugly crawls beneath his skin, gnashing its teeth at the proximity, and Dream is quick to stamp it down and shut it up.</p><p>“Don’t you have anything to say to us?” Sapnap near shouts, tone biting and harsh, but behind the protective wall of molten fire in his eyes, Dream sees raw, unfiltered hurt.</p><p>Guilt tingles in his chest, heavier than a thousand anvils. </p><p>Dream promised that he’d start acting better, nicer, if Sapnap told Ranboo that it’d been too long since he’d visited. That he’d talk – not that there’s much to say.</p><p>“W-What’s there to say?” Dream coughs out, cursing the way his voice fades at the start.</p><p>George watches the conversation, passive. He’s guarding his emotions, just like he always does – in fact, Dream’s surprised George is here at all, because the older almost always cures his problems in the form of sleep and denial that there’s ever even an issue.</p><p>Sapnap looks furious. If this were some fairy-tale comic world or whatever it is that isn’t real life, steam would be roiling out of his ears like some sort of human locomotive. </p><p>But this is life. There is no comedic affect. Just hard truth, the truth that Dream’s old best friends are standing in front of him with murder in their eyes and he couldn’t care less.</p><p>“I don’t know, sorry maybe?”</p><p>George stifles a scoff, but Dream doesn’t.</p><p>“You say that like an apology fixes anything.”</p><p>“Well it damn well would’ve been a start!” Sapnap snarls, hand clenched in a knuckle-whitening grip around the hilt of his axe.</p><p>“A start to what? Forgiveness?” Dream responds without inflection.</p><p>There’s no point to any of this. Two people who used to be attached to him (and he is still attached to) are in his cell to – what? Watch him rot? Gloat?</p><p>“I- I don’t know, maybe?! Anything other than this- whatever this is!”</p><p>Dream glances at George. He’s met with the same, stony gaze that the man has worn the entire visit. It’d be infuriating if it weren’t for the utter tiredness pulling at his eyelids.</p><p>Words are shouted at him, like his ears have been filled with cotton. It takes more concentration than he should probably be comfortable with to bring clarity back to them, and by then he’s missed a fairly large portion of it.</p><p>Dream can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not.</p><p>“Are you even listening, Dream?” Sapnap shouts, bringing him back to reality. “Or am I wasting my breath, giving you a second chance?”</p><p>Dream can’t hide the flinch that wracks his body, and he pretends not to notice George’s razor-sharp gaze pass over him, cutting into him and picking him apart like he’s being vivisected where he sits.</p><p>“I don’t know what you expect from me, Sapnap,” he says, letting the bone-tired feeling seep into his voice like water onto paper. “Just kill me already and get this over with.”</p><p>“So you don’t even want to try?” George speaks, for the first time since Dream awoke. “You’re giving up that easily?”</p><p>Dream nods feebly, throat too wrecked to speak more. His hands lie fidgeting in his lap as he looks at them, like he’s some child being scolded for getting into the cookie jar.</p><p>“And here I thought we were talking to the malicious bastard that massacred the server,” George scoffs, crossing his arms.</p><p>Dream smiles without mirth, chuckling bitterly and wincing at the way the vibrations hurt his throat. “Yeah, well, that guy died a long time ago.”</p><p>He keeps the wish I went with him part to himself, mostly for their peace of mind, because if they didn’t care about him, they wouldn’t be here, offering him some sort of redemption; a second chance.</p><p>“Bull,” Sapnap calls from the chest he migrated to at some point in their conversation, flipping through the pages with something akin to concern written on his face. “If you were dead, we wouldn’t have anything to worry about.”</p><p>It stings. It’s not true, but it stings nonetheless.</p><p>“Well, that’d be too nice for what I deserve, wouldn’t it,” Dream mutters under his breath before he can stop himself and both of them freeze, wide eyes turning to him.</p><p>Oh. Well, this is new.</p><p>George looks sick. Sapnap has gone pale. Dream closes his eyes and lies back down on the floor, too tired to bother staying up.</p><p>“What does that mean?” Sapnap shouts hysterically. There’s the sound of footsteps coming closer as he, presumably, nears, saying in a more hushed tone: “This better not be one of your little games, or I swear I’ll- I’ll…”</p><p>Dream doesn’t speak, too tired to as he listens to Sapnap’s sentence taper off as he struggles to come up with a threat.</p><p>George says nothing, but within the silence Dream can imagine they’re sharing a look.</p><p>“Oh no, buddy. You can’t just say something like that and get away with it,” Sapnap says from somewhere to his right. </p><p>He can feel the tension in the air tighten like a whipcord, a string lying taut between them as his (ex?) friends stand around him, still worried for his wellbeing despite the fact that Dream has done so many things to them, so much to hurt them.</p><p>He doesn’t understand the point, what they have to gain from this, because he doesn’t deserve it, he’s never deserved it, and he never will – proof that they’re too good of people for him, too kind and too caring to be surrounded by such a toxic, vile creature as he, the wolf in sheep’s clothing.</p><p>George whispers something from his left, but Dream is too out of it to bother concentrating on the words. </p><p>The constant tiredness pulls at his very core, dragging him down into the depths of sleep, even as Sapnap and George mutter words that warble and distort like he’s been shoved underwater, suffocating on the thick air that surrounds him like a warm, unwelcome hug.</p><p>Something hot splashes on his face, warm water trickling down the sides and pooling in his ears uncomfortably. Dream moves a hand to wipe it out, blinking tiredly as he’s forced to stay awake.</p><p>“Hey, no. You can’t just ignore us and fall asleep, alright?’</p><p>Dream mumbles something completely incoherent even to him as George shoves him upright from behind, recognizable only by the small, delicate hands that push against his back and shoulders tentatively – Sapnap’s hands are far too calloused and large to be so gentle.</p><p>He sits upright eventually, consciousness returning gradually, the dizzying haze notwithstanding.</p><p>George’s face is covered in a contemplative look, as if he’s trying to see past Dream’s very being and crack open what lies within. </p><p>Dream can’t find it within himself to be bothered by it.</p><p>Sapnap looks contrite, expression a mixture of angry, sad, and confused. His arms are crossed and he shifts from foot to foot impatiently, like he’s on borrowed time.</p><p>He probably is, considering that Sam will find out of their unplanned visit sooner rather than later if he and George don’t get their rears in gear and get out like the voices in Dream’s head have been telling them to for the past half-hour.</p><p>Which brings up the question again, why are they here? </p><p>There’s nothing they could gain from this interaction, nothing Dream would tell them that he wouldn’t tell the others. </p><p>They couldn’t only be here because they care about him, because he’s done too much to hurt them for that to be the case, even if it’s what his heart wants more than anything.</p><p>“What did you mean, Dream?” George asks softly, voice velvet against the loud pops of lava that drown everything else out. His big brown eyes are sad as he looks at Dream, like he’s positively heartbroken at the state the (former?) manipulator is in.</p><p>Dream thinks that his ex-friends shouldn’t care this much about him anymore.</p><p>He runs a shaky hand through his blonde, now thin, hair and takes a deep breath. He has to be honest, because he can’t lie to them like he does to everyone else. They know him to well and he, they. </p><p>“I meant exactly what you think I did,” he says blankly, lowering his arm to his side again.</p><p>George looks conflicted, eyes questioning. Sapnap looks like he’s about to curse, but he doesn’t say anything.</p><p>And then they’re gone, slipping out through whichever way they came through. Dream doesn’t bother to watch them leave, can’t bring himself to stay awake any longer.</p><p>He’s unconscious before he hits the ground, sleep taking over.</p><p>If waking up to people surrounding him is going to become a recurring theme around here, Dream might just try and find a way to stay asleep for longer, just to irritate whoever it is that’s waiting on him.</p><p>This time, it’s just Tommy, Tubbo, and Sam in front of him, the two children in only their clothing while Sam stands there fully decked out in glimmering netherite.</p><p>“Hello Dream,” Tubbo says coolly, professional and casual all at once. </p><p>It’s hard to remember that he’s just a kid when he’s like this, all dressed up in a suit with his hair slicked back and his body language unreadable.</p><p>“We need to talk.”</p><p>Dream knows what they’re going to say. What they’ve always debated about, whether they were aware that he knew their intent is known not to him.</p><p>He nods to show his mental presence, though speaking is a hassle.</p><p>Tommy looks infuriated to be in this hot, humid cell again. Dream doesn’t blame him, all things considering. He’s probably just here because he doesn’t trust Dream to be in a cell alone with Tubbo.</p><p>Good. At least Tommy isn’t trusting Dream too fast.</p><p>“Well, we’ve taken into consideration that it would be unfair for us to learn the key to reviving those who have died without something for you to gain in return,” Tubbo starts professionally, in a jovial tone that grates on the cell walls like nails on a chalkboard.</p><p>It’s too happy for this dark place, a beacon of light in stark contrast to the inky darkness that bleeds off the walls and into your mood. The negativity is infectious, here, and prolonged exposure just makes someone as miserable as Dream is.</p><p>Dream nods, once again, to show that he’s still following and understands. They all know what he’s getting at.</p><p>Sam shifts uncomfortably at Tubbo’s side, like he doesn’t agree with this decision. But, because Tubbo is the president and he has charge over executive powers, Sam is stuck at his mercy.</p><p>Tubbo is also a lawyer, quite high up on the judicial branch, so it’s really no problem for him to orchestrate this bargain – not that he’d have any issues, because everyone wants Wilbur to return and they’re willing to trade the freedom of a powerless (but still powerful) tyrant in exchange for it.</p><p>“Well, Dream, I think you can see what we’re getting at here.” Tubbo straightens his tie, a nervous tic that Dream only knows of from months and months of standing by this child’s side, coercing him that keeping his best friend in exile was for the best, for the bettering of the country-</p><p>Dream stops himself right there, because he’s spent months here and he hasn’t broken once and he sure as hell isn’t breaking in front of them, of all people.</p><p>Weak, weak, weak, something chants in his mind, and Dream locks it away and steels his emotions just like he has even before his incarceration, before the wars, and before becoming the dictator of this whole server.</p><p>Tubbo continues after a pause, and Dream pretends not to notice his hands quiver shakily as they return to their clasped position behind his back.</p><p>He’s been pretending a lot, nowadays, hasn’t he?</p><p>Fake, fake, fake FAKE-</p><p>“We’re willing to trade your knowledge on how to bring Wilbur back, in exchange for your freedom.”</p><p>And, well, we all know the choice is easy.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Psssh, imagine if commenting, leaving kudos, or reading would help the author - it TOTALLY doesn't let me know what to change or how to pace it.</p><p>feedback appreciated. </p><p>thanks for reading  !! &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. I Found You (Or Did You Find Me?)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>It ends like this: Dream is on the ground, wide gashes weeping blood and soaking the once-pretty grass beneath him. Tommy is above him, eyes alight in feral pleasure – and, they’re red? When did that happen?</p><p>Someone shouts, and it sounds a lot like George, but Dream can’t be sure because his vision is growing splotchy and his hearing is a lot less than perfect at that moment. All he knows is that one moment he was prepared for death, and the next he’s still breathing, and the next, and the next, and that means he’s not dead yet.</p><p>A fact that he’s not sure he’s grateful for or not, but what’s happened, happened, and Dream’s not going to spend time crying over spilt milk when he could be using it to escape.</p><p>And so he does, or, at least, tries to.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hello, readers new &amp; old! </p><p>I tried to take my time writing this chapter and fleshing it out, but there are a lot of things that happen in this one, so buckle up and strap in!</p><p>Thank you for your continued support and the kudos, it means so much more than I can describe. </p><p>Listen to 'Are You Glad?' by healer, 'Treasure Map' by DROELOE, &amp; 'Achilles Heel' by J. Maya for this chapter</p><p> </p><p>Enjoy 5.4k words of misery, angst, and oh, what a surprise, more misery</p><p>-love, asy &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s probably a scam. Some sort of manipulation of his vulnerable brain, because this - all of this – is too good to be true.</p><p>It clearly is.</p><p>Tubbo and Tommy are smarter than Dream had remembered them as. Maybe they’d gotten wiser, or maybe he’s just been in here so long he doesn’t remember anything the way he’s supposed to.</p><p>Regardless, he’s given three days for his remedy to prove fruitful in order to gain freedom.</p><p> The anxiety burns in his skull all day, and time passes so much slower than it ever has before, even when Dream spent hours just watching his clock tick, tick, tick, until it became a constant in his head, even long after he’d pitched it into the lava and watched it smolder.</p><p>The small, meager flicker of hope of getting out is now a bright, steady beam of light, and Dream loathes it with every fibre of his being.</p><p>Part of him is nervous, because though Schlatt had promised him it was the cure to reviving the dead, Dream had never had a need for it until now, and the thought of him using his last trump card only to find it ineffective is too despairing to bear.</p><p>For the most part, though, he’s apathetic as always. </p><p>The careless haze never leaves, and Dream treats its company like he would an old friend – not that he would have an example, being that his ex-friends have long since left him behind to rot in this cell. </p><p>He hurt them outside of it, he continues to hurt them from inside. There’s no end in sight, really. Dream’s existence is problematic at best, a fact that he’d come to realize long before his capture.</p><p>It’s not a new development. Dream’s got a knack for making enemies out of people and has a general attraction for confusion and disorder. Whereas peace is always boring and broken, chaos is exciting and unwavering, and Dream is addicted to it.</p><p>He loves the feel of it, loves the exhileration – chaos is Dream’s kryptonite, his drug, and he’ll do anything to get it, a fact that he realizes whilst staring at the black borders of his cage and thinks, and you wonder how you got in here.</p><p>Eventually, Sam comes back with a solemn look on his face.</p><p>Dream is prepared for his execution right then and there, eyeing the gleaming sword with way too much attraction to be healthy. Maybe if it all ends here, right now, he won’t have to feel the stupid something that claws in his chest and crushes his lungs like a never-ending inferno of hate, hate, hate and guilt, guilt, guilt.</p><p>Instead, though, a rope is tied around his wrists and a blindfold crowns his head. The darkness makes his nerves rattle underneath his skin. Blood pulses in his ears, and Dream is grateful that Sam is a quiet man, because he doesn’t think he’d be able to understand any words spoken even if they were repeated a thousand times.</p><p>Maybe they’re making a show of his killing? Revealing to him the tarnished remains of his once-proud creation, thriving more than it ever had when he was present, and then brutally murdering him in front of his enemies?</p><p>All thoughts cease when the loud, watery sounds of a nether portal meet his ears.</p><p>The feeling of cool air hitting his face and the soft, supple grass beneath his feet is something Dream will remember for years to come. A gentle breeze whispers between his overgrown locks in a gentle caress.</p><p>Dream unknowingly leans forward, and before he knows it, the ropes chafing on his wrist are gone. He surges forward, leaping onto the green, green, green not black grass and looking around at the brown, brown, brown dirt and the blue, blue, blue water around him.</p><p>His bare feet ache soothingly at the feeling of grass tickling his soles, and Dream, in a fit of energy, decides to lie down amongst the long blades, ripping out a few for the sake of giving his hands something to do.</p><p>He doesn’t care what the people present – they, being Sam, Punz, Sapnap, and George - think, in that moment. All he knows is that he’s finally free, out of that stupid cell with the stupid lectern and its stupid books and stupid cauldron.</p><p>He’s free.</p><p>The reality hits him like a hoglin’s head, knocking the breath out of his lungs and leaving him at a loss for words. A laugh bubbles from his lips, grating against his throat in protest, but he can’t be bothered to care right then.</p><p>I’m free! Dream says silently, lips moving in a silhouette to speaking. </p><p>“I’m free!!” Dream says not-so-silently, too happy to care about the pain that strikes his vocal cords at that moment. </p><p>His items haven’t been returned to him – they never will, Sam had assured as burned the key to Dream’s locker – and Dream has virtually nothing in this world, because surely no one on this server is going to give him anything, and even though the strange apathy that’d overtaken him in the prison is gone, he can’t find it in himself to care.</p><p>This time, though, it’s like voluntary ignorance, instead of the desperate clawing at anything, anything at all, to try and feel something for once-</p><p>Dream shuts that thought process off for another time, forces himself to focus on the present, because he’s free and that’s all that matter in this instance.</p><p>Call it elation, call it madness – whatever the term for it is, Dream could scour the very pits of his soul and not find an inch of sadness at the prospect of starting over. </p><p>There’s no welcoming party waiting for him as he makes his way to Prime Path. Everyone despises him here, loathes his very existence, and Dream’s sure that as soon as word gets out there’ll be plenty of people out for his head.</p><p>Because it’s fair game now. There’s nothing that Dream’s worth anymore. To them, he’s just a parasite plaguing their paradise, and surely they’ve still got a bone to pick with him – it can’t have been so long that they’ve forgotten he exists.</p><p>Of course, the first structure in sight, aside from the prison (which Dream is pointedly not looking at because it’s already bringing back memories of lava, heat, nothing but heat, bread and only bread, the stupid books and those stupid empty pages that look back at him and smile and laugh-) is Bad and Skeppy’s mansion, though it’s covered in a strange red vine that Dream can’t help but think looks strangely out of place and belongs there all at once.</p><p>He passes it without a second glance, nervous that if he lingers too long someone will notice he’s out sooner, and the last thing he wants right now is to be cornered and attacked the second he’s been released.</p><p>The rest of the SMP remains the same, and yet, somehow, it’s incredibly different. It’s not changed in the abrupt way that Dream can’t recognize anything anymore, not large towers where houses once stood – more like, it’s changed in the subtle way that Dream will see a missing block where a flower once resided. </p><p>It’s in the small things he notices the passage of time. The path has become a combination of several different types of wood, not just spruce and oak. The bare hill that split on either side of the road is now flattened out, replaced by a house Dream doesn’t recognize.</p><p>For the most part, the Greater SMP has remained untouched, a relic of time, of what might’ve been, and yet, Dream can’t help but feel like a stranger in his own home.</p><p>He pauses at the crest of the SMP, right in front of Tommy’s old house, and simply just takes it all in.</p><p>No longer is this land his home, his place of peace. Gone is the serene, beautiful land he helped create and shape with his bare hands. Traces of it are still seen in the way Tommy’s carrot farm remains sowed, taken care of over the months, but the feeling of being whole here has been stripped, leaving only its bare remnants for all to see.</p><p>He shouldn’t be here. He doesn’t belong here, not in this place that’s so bright and frighteningly new. This isn’t his anymore. </p><p>(It never was, a small voice in his head whispers)</p><p>And then, as if summoned by his garish unbelonging, someone shouts, and the moment of stillness is severed.</p><p>He whips around, hand instinctively reaching for an axe that isn’t there, and curses when the jarring sight of Tommy greets him, which is about all the time he has before the younger is on him, eyes ablaze and sword alight, swinging and slashing as Dream tries desperately to dodge killing blows.</p><p>Of course, outmatched as he is, Dream can’t avoid all of the hits, and his arms and legs quickly become marred in gashing lacerations that burn, searing into his skin like a hot knife through butter, and he splits his lower lip trying to hold in a scream that will surely wreck his throat for weeks to come.</p><p>It ends like this: Dream is on the ground, wide gashes weeping blood and soaking the once-pretty grass beneath him. Tommy is above him, eyes alight in feral pleasure – and, they’re red? When did that happen?</p><p>Someone shouts, and it sounds a lot like George, but Dream can’t be sure because his vision is growing splotchy and his hearing is a lot less than perfect at that moment. All he knows is that one moment he was prepared for death, and the next he’s still breathing, and the next, and the next, and that means he’s not dead yet.</p><p>A fact that he’s not sure he’s grateful for or not, but what’s happened, happened, and Dream’s not going to spend time crying over spilt milk when he could be using it to escape.</p><p>And so he does, or, at least, tries to.</p><p>He’s managed to crawl about five paces away before he’s being pinned down again, held under a lung-crushing weight on the small of his back. The survivalist in him, bruised, damaged, and beaten, still sparks alive and insists that if he twists at a certain angle, grabs his captor’s ankle, he might have a chance at escape.</p><p>What’s the point? Something within him shouts.</p><p>Fight, run, just to be inevitably caught again? </p><p>Every square inch of this place has been scoured and discovered and inhabited. Someone would find him eventually. They always do.</p><p>Strong, sturdy ties are wrapped around his wrists, chafing against the already damaged skin and burning it raw. The feeling brings back all too many memories of purple and green discs, the feeling of everyone’s gazes tearing into him like a lion through a lamb, and the bone-deep ache of defeat.</p><p>A hand is thrusted between his shoulder blades, someone’s yanking the rope around his wrists, and he’s thrusted into another time, oh-so-long ago, when there’s hundreds of eyes scorning his every move and the bright glow of a nether portal hums in front of him.</p><p>A time when all he’d ever wanted was control, and he was so close to achieving it, just one meaningless life away from happiness-</p><p>Dream nearly snarls, whether in fear or in anger is known not to him.</p><p>Whoever’s above him can feel his body tense, and subsequently his legs are held down by an additional pair of hands. The distinct shrillness of Tommy’s voice greets his ears like the hiss of a rattlesnake before the kill.</p><p>It was a trick, This was all a trick, and Dream, ever the idiot, fell for it.</p><p>Turns out, months in prison haven’t changed a thing about this place, not in the long run.</p><p>Dream’s still foolish, Tommy’s still cruel, and nothing will ever change.</p><p>One moment, Dream’s pinned underneath the very child he’d worked so hard to destroy, and the next, he’s being dragged upward by the shoulders and thrusted forward.</p><p>“-eam! Dream, RUN!” </p><p>His legs are moving without thinking, and the sound of netherite boots close behind him is fuel to go faster. </p><p>Spots grow in his vision as he runs, gathering like bacteria, and it’s only on sheer adrenaline that Dream can keep going. </p><p>Everything around him sounds warbled and contorted, like whoever’s speaking is in another dimension, but the distinct tone of Sapnap’s voice shouting “Run!” grounds him, encourages him to keep running.</p><p>A hand grabs his bound wrists and before Dream can even comprehend what’s happening he’s ripped off the ground and onto the back of a horse. George is behind him, reins in hand, and it’s not but a moment later that the thought of I’m safe whispers in his head that he’s gone.</p><p>When Dream awakes, it’s to a familiar crackling sound. </p><p>Oh no. Please, please no-</p><p>He’d been caught. He’s done for. They got what they wanted out of him and now he’s back in the cell, locked away until his bones have long turned to dust and the obsidian walls have cracked and broken.</p><p>He doesn’t want to open his eyes. Doesn’t want to confirm what he knows to be true. </p><p>“Dream,” says a voice that sounds an awful like Sapnap’s, but Dream knows it’s not him because Sapnap would never want to visit him after he’d told the secret, wouldn’t want to see the broken mess he’d become.</p><p>“Dreamie poo, wake up~” the younger’s voice says like a song. And at Dream’s lack of response: “Fine. guess we’re leaving him behind, George.”</p><p>A chuckle escapes his lips, burning like sandpaper against his throat. </p><p>He’s not real, a voice in his head says, but Dream laughs all the same. It’s stupid and it’s pointless and it’s not even funny, but his friend’s voice jars something in him he doesn’t want to deal with, so he laughs.</p><p>“I knew you were awake!” Says the voice from somewhere above him, and a second later there’s a hand pushing his shoulder that’s solid and unmistakably real-</p><p>Dream’s eyes fly open, and instead of seeing the dark obsidian, he sees blue skies, white clouds, and the startling face of Sapnap.</p><p>His mouth opens and forms in a faux imitation of the words he wants to say, but no sound comes out, even when he pauses to try again. </p><p>He would’ve sworn under his breath if he could. Talking so much in the past few days must’ve worn his voice out. </p><p>That’s going to make things so much harder now, especially when his childhood ex-friends are standing in front of him.</p><p>Sapnap looks like he understands the struggle after a few seconds of confused staring, and quickly fills in the gaps of conversation with monologue.</p><p>“Get up, sleepyhead. We’ve got to get going before the others catch up.” Sapnap clutches a small pack from beside him and stands, stepping away.</p><p>Though he’s still confused, Dream complies and slowly rises, looking around for things that still needed to be picked up. </p><p>George is farther away, stuffing what looks to be arrows into his pack. Dream slowly approaches him with a basket of food in tow, offering it to the older since he had no satchel of his own.</p><p>“That should be it,” Sapnap calls from the other end of their little clearing, slinging his backpack over his shoulders. George nods in affirmation, and the two begin walking west, leaving Dream to follow behind.</p><p>They travel in relative silence for a while. The sun glares menacingly from between the gaps of the canopied branches, and in the small patches where trees are sparse, the heat sears into Dream’s back in a way that’s way too familiar to be comfortable.</p><p>He finds himself passing through those clearings a little faster than the others.</p><p>There’s an abundance of unanswered questions rattling around in his head, but from the looks of it, neither of the men in front of him are willing to discuss them. </p><p>Dream pretends their inconsiderateness doesn’t hurt, because really, he’s done so much worse to them, and this is the least he deserves for it. Especially after his apparent saving from the clutches of the rest of the SMP.</p><p>Which brings the question up again - why did they save him in the first place? He’s of no use to them anymore. He’d used his trump card, given the information everyone was so desperate to know, and yet they still save him. </p><p>It doesn’t make any sense, and if Dream could, he’d have voiced this.</p><p>Instead, he tries to use hand signals to communicate his questions, because they all know the codes used for covert operations, but that’s more of commanding and informing than questioning – which makes asking questions so much harder because there just aren’t words in the language for what he wants to convey.</p><p>Why? Dream signs, trying to catch their eye. </p><p>“Because you were going to die, duh,” Sapnap says, like he hadn’t been the person to threaten taking his final life if he were to escape.</p><p>Dream scowls. Why? He signs again, refusing to elaborate – they both know what he means, anyways.</p><p>Sapnap giggles childishly, falling silent afterwards. Dream pokes his side, irritated, and this time, it’s George who answers.</p><p>“What would’ve you done if we let you be taken back to the cell?” George asks in response, which is mildly annoying but at least Dream is getting somewhere, so he ignores the flare of anger and instead focuses on formulating a reply.</p><p>Sleep, clock, Dream says with his hands.</p><p>“And what would that have done?”</p><p>Dream wonders if it’s a trick question. He offers a quirked eyebrow before responding. Nothing to do.</p><p>“Exactly. You being in that cell solves nothing. They wanted to put you back in because that’s where you’d be contained, but you wouldn’t heal or get better there,” George says, like he hasn’t just stated that the entirety of Dream’s time in the prison was all for naught.</p><p>Countless hours of torture and waiting and crying and staring and boredom, all for nothing. This doesn’t fix him, doesn’t fix what he’s done, doesn’t fix anything. </p><p>Just kill me then. Get it over with. </p><p>George’s jaw drops. Dream halts, impassive, and drops the stone axe they’d handed him. </p><p>Answers, he signs.</p><p>They both ignore him, opting to stay silent as Dream stews in anger, following behind like some lost puppy. He has half a mind to take off right now, run away and disappear into the woodland like he did in the manhunts from so long ago.</p><p>But it wouldn’t accomplish anything, in the long run. The SMP is probably hellbent on getting him back into the prison and, loathe as he is to admit it, George and Sapnap are his only hope of faring out here with limbs weakened from underuse and skills long since forgotten.</p><p>So Dream sighs, idly swinging his axe, and waits.</p><p>And waits. And waits, until the sun is dipping down beneath the horizon and George and Sapnap have finally stopped.</p><p>His muscles are screaming at him, tired and sore from the sudden abuse. George and Sapnap hadn’t proffered any breaks for his feeble strength, continued walking when Dream stumbled, and as such he had forced every bit of his energy into staying upright and walking along at a steady pace, albeit slower than the others.</p><p>Dream thinks this is the least he deserves, considering they’ve saved him and are currently helping him get away from the people of the SMP.</p><p>They don’t gather logs for a fire or even pull out bundles to sleep on, which tells Dream that despite their seeming assurance of going in the right direction and the packs they carry, the decision to leave was abrupt and impromptu and made without much forethought.</p><p>Dream chuckles at the familiarity of it, because all those long years ago before the SMP was even created, he and Bad had always been the ones to prepare their supplies and weapons.</p><p>George and Sapnap always made impulsive, rash decisions and even though years have passed and wars have been waged, it’s a small comfort to know that there’s still some semblance of their old selves here – something Dream finds himself mildly resenting as he mulls it over, lying on the cold ground and unable to sleep.</p><p>Dream has changed so much from then. Then, he’d been strong, confident, caring. </p><p>He’d jump into any situation unprepared if it meant a chance of protecting his family from harm. Bad often chastised him for his recklessness late at night, when Dream would come home beaten and bloody from whatever fray he’d half-wittedly thrown himself into.</p><p>Now, he’s nothing but a mere shell of the man he was. If the younger Dream looked at himself in the mirror, would he recognize who he saw? Or would he scream, frightened by the monster wearing his skin and hurting his friends?</p><p>He’s so much more and yet so much less of the man he was. He’s cold, calculating, and an opportunist at heart. He’ll take advantage of whatever lenience is bestowed before him and turn it into a deal in which he comes out on top.</p><p>Long gone is the fearless boy who laughed in the face of danger and enjoyed long, meaningless conversations with friends. </p><p>In his stead lies a man whose every sentence has a purpose, some underlying meaning, and every second of his every day is spent thinking of ways to exploit the weakness of anyone he meets, a man who’s so invested into his control of others that he barely spares a glance to the people he’d fought so hard to protect.</p><p>You’re not him anymore, Dream tells himself, and wills it to be true.</p><p>The moon has risen high into the sky by now, and Sapnap has already switched his nightshift with George. Dream tries to ignore the little sting in his chest at the fact that they don’t trust him not to run away at the first chance given, that they don’t trust him to stay and alert them if any danger comes.</p><p>George, now on duty, is sat at the edge of the area with a gleaming netherite sword in hand. Dream ignores the memories the sight brings to him and instead shuffles over to the smaller man.</p><p>No words are spoken as he sits, carefully, next to the older. They stare at the darkness for a long time, silent, a wordless communication of everything and nothing at once.</p><p>“I’m sure you’re wanting answers,” George says finally, sometime around three in the morning. </p><p>Dream can’t find it in himself to be rude, so he just nods slowly, though it’s probably hard for George to see it in the dim lighting.</p><p>“They were going to put you back,” George begins, and Dream nods again, urging for him to continue. “I saw how you were, in that cell. Sapnap and I – we couldn’t – I couldn’t bear to think of you in there, alone and miserable.”</p><p>It hurts. It hurts to think that even after all he’s done, all he’s said, they still love him, even though he doesn’t deserve it. </p><p>The words go unspoken, but they’re there all the same, in the way that only friends who have been together for as long as the three can comprehend. A bone-deep understanding that dwells in the air, a blanket of comfort.</p><p>“The others – something changed. They’re not the same. Tubbo told me he wanted to lie about your freedom, manipulate you and get what he wanted.”</p><p>The ‘just like you did’ lies unsaid, but it’s communicated in the way George looks at Dream with reluctant fondness and a sad, sad fear in his doe brown eyes.</p><p>“I knew something was wrong, and a few days later Sapnap came to me saying that Tommy had burned down part of the community house. That’s when we started planning our escape.”</p><p>George hesitates, then, and releases a shaky sigh. “I told him – I told him that we needed to get you out, to find some way to help you escape, and-“ he breaks off.</p><p>Dream awkwardly places a hand on the smaller man’s shoulder, trying to portray that he understood, that everything was going to be okay, that he was fine, and he was here and in the flesh.</p><p>“Well, then they brought you out, and I thought maybe they’d changed their minds, maybe they’d realized what they were doing was no better than what you did-“ a shaky inhale. Quivering exhale as George collects himself. </p><p>A sigh. “They didn’t,” he laments, hands clutching his legs and curling into himself. “I saw Tommy about to kill you and I – I panicked, I didn’t want you to die, I didn’t want any of this!</p><p>“Sapnap got him off of you, and then the whole server was there, ready to tear our heads off – Dream, I didn’t think we would make it out.”</p><p>Dream is silent, contemplating. “But you did,” he coughs out hoarsely, throat dry and scratchy. “Th – Thank you, for taking me.”</p><p>George says nothing, and Dream can’t say anything more. </p><p>His arms are heavy and his legs are leaden, so Dream simply lies on his back and sits, palming the lush grass between his fingers. The feeling is comforting, rhythmic, and once again he’s reminded of how much he missed the world outside.</p><p>He missed the colors, he missed how they looked, he missed the feeling of soft grass beneath his feet and the cool breeze on his face, devoid of heat. Everything so little about the world, like the sound of bees buzzing around Tubbo’s garden, stripped away from him in that tiny cell with no one to talk to and nothing to do and nothing but the sound of lava and the taste of bread-</p><p>Dream’s broken out of his train of thought when George lies next to him, staring at the stars with a shaky exhale. </p><p>The silence between them is nice – comforting - and Dream selfishly hoards it to himself. How long had it been since he’d felt like this? Relaxed, peaceful, without the looming threat of death and war hanging over his head?</p><p>He’d forgotten what freedom felt like. He’s forgotten so many things, locked away in that cramped, dark cell, and now that it’s back he feels like something’s missing. </p><p>What else had he forgotten? What was he supposed to remember, other than the sickening feeling of hatred boiling in his gut and the festering guilt swarming in his chest?</p><p>Morning comes and goes, and they’re off again. Dream’s entire body hates him with a passion, sore and achy at the abuse and lack of rest. He pays no mind to it, instead focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and not stumbling into anything.</p><p>The landscape fades from bright, lush woodland to the sun-bleached hues of the savannah, dry and sparse. Sheep graze in the distance, serving as a reminder of a time once simpler, back when the only thing they were concerned with was beating the game with whatever modifications they’d made.</p><p>(“This is like, sheep, sheep, savannah, or something,” George said, sprinting past the flocks and following an Enderman.</p><p>Sapnap chuckles and Dream bursts out laughing, a steady wheeze in his voice present.)</p><p>His grasp on the stone axe is ever-present, never laxing as they trudge on. The heat of the sun beats down on him relentlessly, subdued. It’s not quite as hot as the lava-scorched cell had been, but the feeling is unpleasant and reminds him of it all the same.</p><p>A desert is present in the distance, and the thought of crossing the arid, sweltering terrain with what little materials they have makes a pit of dread arise in his stomach, unwavering even as he rests in the cool shade of an acacia tree.</p><p>Midday, the trio have to take breaks often to avoid the burning sun pelting on their backs, and travel is slow. </p><p>This goes on for the remainder of the day, until the sun touches the tips of the trees, and they all stop to regather themselves and get some rest after a long day of walking.</p><p>George and Sapnap busy themselves with finding food and iron, while Dream scours the land for dead-looking branch to use as kindling, since they’d decided they were far enough away from the SMP to be safe with a fire burning.</p><p>“Hey there, Dreamie,” says Sapnap suddenly says, and Dream belatedly realizes he must’ve zoned out, because the sun has long since disappeared beneath the earth and the daunting hue of twilight paints the sky a blackish-purple.</p><p>Dream doesn’t look at it any longer and rises, plagued by unpleasant memories, and sparks the fire.</p><p>George is still away, and the silence rests between the two in a way unlike the night previous. </p><p>This quiet is tense and awkward, and Dream can feel the ire with which Sapnap gazes at him, even as the younger kindly hands him a morsel of cooked steak.</p><p>“You better be a fucking saint to George,” Sapnap starts suddenly, glaring at the food he holds in his hands.</p><p>“What?” Dream asks around a mouthful of steak, the first words he’d spoken since the sun had risen.</p><p>He’d grown so accustomed to silence, to not having to speak, that even in playful banter and jokes he’d been quiet. </p><p>Now, it comes to bite him in the rear, because the vibrations grate on his vocal cords like nails on chalkboard.</p><p>“You. Don’t. Deserve. George,” Sapnap spits, and though the heartache in his voice is present, it’s masked by the anger with which he coats it.</p><p>“I don’t understand,” Dream coughs, worried.</p><p>It’s just him and Sapnap now. George is obviously the only one that wanted to help him, what’s Sap to do when George is away?</p><p>“He didn’t tell you, did he?” The ravenette scoffs, as if he already knows the answer to his question despite the fact that Dream hasn’t responded yet. “Of course he didn’t.”</p><p>At Dream’s proffered silence, he continues.</p><p>“George told me what the others were going to do to you. He begged me to take you with us. I told him no, because I said you deserved to be in there, and I meant it.”</p><p>None of it’s a surprise, but the familiar ache in Dream’s chest returns tenfold. </p><p>He’d done this. He’d brought this on himself. </p><p>Why are they helping him?</p><p>“He begged me to, Dream. He. Begged. Me. For you.”</p><p>Guilt crawls into his chest, even if wasn’t his choice to come along. George had too much pride, too much dignity to beg someone, even if it was Sapnap. The thought of him so desperate makes Dream’s blood boil and self-hatred course through his veins.</p><p>“I only did it because he said he wouldn’t go if you didn’t come along,” Sapnap finishes, an ugly, bitter tone to his voice. </p><p>“’M sorry,” Dream says, but the words are empty, because they both know apologies don’t mean anything here.</p><p>“Just let me make one thing clear, here, Dream. I’m doing this for George, not you. You fucked up big time, and I don’t know when, or even if, I’m ever going to forgive you for hurting us, for hurting him.</p><p>“And if it comes down to it, I’m going to save George over you, and I’m not going to say I’ll be sorry because we both know that I won’t be.”</p><p>Dream just nods numbly, a hollow feeling creeping into his chest.</p><p>George returns shortly after with more cooked mutton, and the evening goes back to normal. Neither Dream nor Sapnap mention the conversation that occurred between them, and George doesn’t notice their silence.</p><p>Dream lays on the hard ground, kneading the grass between his fingers, and it’s only by the absolute agony of his muscles that he doesn’t pass out right then and there.</p><p>Sapnap has made his point clear. If they’re ever in any danger, Dream’s the only one looking out for himself. </p><p>It’s nothing new, even before the SMP he’d been forced to survive on his own with no one to help. The realization still stings, though, because it’s made one thing abundantly clear above all else:</p><p>Even here, with his friends, Dream is alone. That’s how it’s always been.</p><p>Dream feels like that’s how it’ll always be.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Kudos? Subscribing? Commenting? </p><p>What're those, amirite, chat?</p><p>Thanks for reading!! Expect updates soon :)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. We'll Get There Eventually (We'll Get There Never)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>George mutters something too quiet for Dream to hear. Sapnap nods sharply, glancing sideways at the shorter man before looking back at Dream, dropping his sword. </p><p> </p><p>YES!! They’re going to join him in the water, oh, the water feels so good, it’s so cold and refreshing and dry and cold and- </p><p> </p><p>Wait. </p><p> </p><p>Dry?</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>hardest installment to write, as of yet! over a month of hiatus, who'd guess it would be hard to get back in the groove?</p><p>sorry for the wait, blame my keyboard :p</p><p>For this chapter, the best songs to listen to are: 'The Fox' by North Bloom, 'Shelter' by RHÊTORÍK, and 'Ew' by Emily Deahl. </p><p>Enjoy some more misery &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The awe-inspiring view of dawnbreak is always a sight Dream loves to see. Bright, colorful rays clash in stark contrast to the smooth, inky black sky above. Stars twinkle and flicker as the sun awakens, greeting the world to a new day. </p><p> </p><p>Long before anyone had heard such a name as his, Dream would arise every day just to watch the sun kiss the earth, to feel the cool mist of the morning slowly heat with the day. It's a luxury he hasn't spared himself in years, and Dream misses the freedom of coming and going wherever and whenever he pleases, unburdened by worry and wars. </p><p> </p><p>Carefully, he rises from his spot - in the middle of the clearing, for he had yet to gain the trust of the others - and tentatively gathers the items he'd strewn about the evening before. Silently, he steps around the sleeping form of Sapnap, who looks flat-out exhausted, black hair mussed and bandanna drooping in front of his eyes. He looks like he'd just fallen asleep while playing 'Dead-Man' - a thought that derives a quiet chuckle from Dream's chest.  </p><p> </p><p>In another time, Dream would've probably made a comment about it, maybe run off to tell George and then brutally kick him awake – a time where they were still best friends and no country tried to split off and declare independence and the war and misery that would inevitably follow. </p><p> </p><p>George has posted his watch a little far off to the right, delicately sitting in the low-hanging bough of an acacia tree. The sun's rays color his pale skin in soft, yellow rays and highlight just the barest edges of his features. </p><p> </p><p>Dream considers joining him and watching the sunset together, just like they did Before, but something - something holds him back, a pang of entangled guilt that resonates in his gut like it's riddled with disease. </p><p> </p><p>He doesn't want confrontation, and if he gains George's attention now, in the quiet of this peaceful, dewy morning, that is exactly what will happen.  </p><p> </p><p>Not spoken aloud, no, because that’s not how George has ever handled his anger towards another. Instead, George will make it present in the way that he will inevitably shift farther away from the younger and Dream has to pretend not to notice and convince himself that it doesn’t pierce his chest in a way that no sword ever could.  </p><p> </p><p>And, well- he's always been good at pretending everything's okay, denying the reality for what it truly is, so that’s what he’ll do, and keep doing until he can’t ignore it any longer.  </p><p> </p><p>(Which is a long time, because he’s had more than enough practice with this – it’s familiar, it’s something he knows, and it’s something he can control the outcome of. It’s controllable. Which is all it really boils down to, isn’t it? He’s always been about control, even before the idea of inviting Wilbur to the server was conceived; it was simply just more... dormant.)  </p><p> </p><p>Something curdles in his gut, and it's only by the bare thread of strength he has left that he doesn't vomit. </p><p> </p><p>The axe in his grip is heavy, far too heavy for a simple stone tool. The wood doesn't fit his hand right, doesn't mold around his fingers like Nightmare did, but the feel still brings him back to a time when he was lifting it to Tubbo's neck, goading Tommy into just taking the discs and leaving his best friend to face the penalty of death he'd enforced. </p><p> </p><p>Bile rises in his throat. Tubbo was just a child. Tubbo and Tommy were just children, and he, the ruler of the Greater SMP couldn't spare a measly Klick of land at the expense of nothing but his own blasted pride. </p><p> </p><p>(He denies the part of himself that still surges with anger at the thought of them encroaching on his land, that he fought tooth and nail for, that he bargained and pleaded and begged to earn, to have a safe haven in which he and his friends could live.) </p><p> </p><p>In a desperate attempt at his own solace, Dream wobbles his way past the ever-sleeping form of Sapnap, careful to stay silent – a feat which is proving more and more difficult as time goes by, what with the heaviness in his limbs and the out-of-body sensation he’s been feeling since the beginning. </p><p> </p><p>Part of him wonders if this, all of this – being set free, escaping, running away, if it’s all some stilted dream, because it so very much feels like one.  </p><p> </p><p>He can’t believe in the soft feel of grass tickling his bare and calloused feet, nor the sweet, pollen-laden scent of flowers in bloom, or the invigorating taste of fresh air blanketing his tongue. He can’t bring himself to hope that, after all of the fighting and bleeding and death he’d inflicted and brought on, he’s finally free. </p><p> </p><p>Dream has never been free. Not truly free, as he is nearing to be now. This freedom, it’s so close that it’s palpable, as if he could simply reach out and pluck it from the air and hold forever in his grasp. He can go anywhere he wants, anytime he wants, without paranoia or stress. </p><p> </p><p>Dream could disappear, right now, if he wanted. Leave behind George and Sapnap, run off to the very farthest corners of the world – or, even better, leave the server itself – and start anew; never to face the treachery of his decisions again. </p><p> </p><p>But Dream- Dream is a selfish man, and even now in his weakness, he clings to the stupid, naïve hope that he’ll one day gain back the trust of those he loves most. One day, meaning never, because it’s a wonder that his former friends haven’t yet left him to fend for himself, all because- </p><p> </p><p>Because, even through everything, they still love him.  </p><p> </p><p>It’s a fact that bitters his tongue and latches into his gut. They love him, and he’s nothing but poison in return. He's Snow White’s rotten apple- no, he’s the witch that cursed it, and he will be the death of them because anything he has ever done for this world has ended in death and destruction and being locked away behind layers and layers of obsidian, never to see the light of day again- </p><p> </p><p>Stop. You’re not there anymore, he tells himself, taking a deep breath. You are here, living, and you are never going back to that place again.  </p><p> </p><p>After all he’s done to them, after all that he’s done to the others, they still love him. They haven’t forgiven him, not by a long shot, but because they love him he knows they will – one day, eventually, never. </p><p> </p><p>They trust him, in a meagre amount, not to slip off while George has his back turned. They haven’t yet used the weakness potion that he knows Sapnap has on him, nor brandished their swords in any manner of threatening towards him. </p><p> </p><p>Dream stays. He owes them at least that much, though how his presence will make anyone feel better is beyond his understanding. </p><p> </p><p>He is poison. But he is wanted, all the same. It's unfair and it’s cruel to them, even if they don’t realize it yet. It’s downright toxic, in every fibre of itself – but it’s what they want, and he can handle it as long as they need. It’s the least he can do, and yet the worst he can, too. </p><p> </p><p>(For him or them, he can’t decide) </p><p> </p><p>The morning passes swiftly, and though Dream can feel the exhaustion and heat pulling at his bones, picking him apart and weighing at his core, he continues trudging at the grueling pace they’ve set for themselves. </p><p> </p><p>Somehow, Sapnap has become the most paranoid of the three (something that, if the old, old Dream had found out, would’ve been proclaimed with a psychotic giggle and wheezy laugh) and positioned himself at the back of their little parade, sword in hand and a reinforced shield in the other.  </p><p> </p><p>Typically, George stands at the front of their three-man phalanx and watches ahead, looking for any piece of land that they could utilize to their advantage – whether that be a tree in the sparse land they can perch under and take a break, or a particularly weak-looking log that they could use for easy wood; the odd sheep or cow also wouldn’t be overlooked, since, despite their large supply farm at home, food is scarce in the savannah, especially as they near the desert. </p><p> </p><p>Speaking of. The sandy dunes are within a few chunks’ reach now, and the last of the trees have already given way to a half-grass, half-sand terrain that serves as a bridge between the two biomes. The heat encroaches on all their backs, sweltering and raining beads of sweat down their faces and backs. </p><p> </p><p>Dream idly wonders why George and Sapnap don’t choose to simply travel during the nighttime, where there will be cold weather, but then amends himself before he can ask.; the answer is obvious to anyone who isn’t as oblivious as Tommy (which excludes Dream himself, because Dream was the one who fell for Tommy’s plan to capture him in the first place). </p><p> </p><p>Well-known fact about the desert: there is no cover, anywhere.  </p><p> </p><p>Lesser-known fact? Due to aforementioned lack of cover, the night is deathly cold, and to survive the night they would need to spark up a fire – which, conveniently, would attract the multitude of mobs that prowl the lands, which would be reason two as to why travelling at night would be a bad idea. </p><p> </p><p>The three of them are all accomplished fighters, but Dream is weak from his stint in Pandora’s Vault, and though George and Sapnap can hold their own, it’d be a tight feat to protect both Dream and themselves, all while still covering ground at a high enough rate for the fight to be worth it. </p><p> </p><p>So, yeah, fat chance of that happening anytime soon. </p><p> </p><p>Dream tries to convince himself that the sweat uncomfortably trickling down his spine and making its way down his legs is better than being impaled by some stupid skeleton with Aim-Bot on.  </p><p> </p><p>Imagine that. The all-powerful and infamous Dream, dead by the spindly little hands of a skeleton, of all things. Admittedly, not as flashy as he’d expect himself to go out, but it’s better than being mauled to death by a zombie or crushed by some angry Iron Golem, or, End forbid, getting torn apart limb by limb by the likes of an Enderman. </p><p> </p><p>On his headstone (if the SMP bothered to give him a proper grave, let alone a headstone), underneath his name would be emblazoned with his final words: “Hacker!” </p><p> </p><p>A chuckle almost bursts its way past his lips at the thought, and Dream thinks it would’ve felt so good to just let it out, but something- something stops it from ever leaving his throat. There’s no point in laughing. No one else knows the train of thought he’d just had. George and Sapnap wouldn’t find it funny if he retold it. It’s not necessary, and would only cause confusion and a more tepid sense of awkwardness between them. </p><p> </p><p>-Which is another thing. One would expect, that, after your best friend does evil, unimaginable, things to the world’s young, and then is promptly placed in prison by you yourself and then you’re stuck together in a room, the air between you and said person would be considerably awkward, if not angry. </p><p> </p><p>But, walking the desert, with George and Sapnap in tow – Dream is surprised to not to find even an ounce of tension between the three. He slots right into place with them, casually glancing around their surroundings as if watching for potential threats; just like the old days, after Manhunt was over and they would travel back to the SMP, exhausted and happy.  </p><p> </p><p>Dream was the very paranoid one then, and would normally sit at the back to ensure nobody got lost or was attacked while their guard was down, but it’s not so hard to adjust to the man glaring holes into his back and the stiff, cold silence of the other man in front of him – he'd gotten plenty of time to get used to that after L’Manburg was founded. </p><p> </p><p>Dream loathes the way he finds himself at peace here, with his once-best-friends in the whole world, even when it’s apparent that the only reason nobody’s started a screaming match with him is because they’re too exhausted to do it, or maybe just more focused on finding wherever it is they’re going to. </p><p> </p><p>“Hey, where are we headed, anyway?” Dream asks, breaking the silence that’d been cast upon them since yesterday evening. </p><p> </p><p>Nobody answers. Dream doesn’t expect them to. </p><p> </p><p>The desert seems to stretch for forever. Not a village nor a single green thing in sight. No wells, either. Just the same, hot, heat and the same, bland, sight at the same, grueling, pace. </p><p> </p><p>They walk for hours. Their canteens and water bottles have long been dried, and the thick parch on Dream’s tongue lets him know he can’t continue on like this for much longer. Briefly, he wonders how far they have to go until the sun will set and they’re stranded out here, in the desert and shivering, huddled together because they can’t afford the struggle a fire will bring. </p><p> </p><p>Why don’t you just leave me, he wants to scream at them. So far, they’ve had to provide food, water, and even the effort of slowing down when he tries to catch up. He’s a hindrance to them, so why haven’t they just dumped him in a ditch somewhere and just let him rot?  </p><p> </p><p>Surely, they can’t love him more than they want to get out of these conditions, not with how he’s treated them lately.  </p><p> </p><p>So why? Why, why, why, why, why?  </p><p> </p><p>That’s all he wants to know. It’s what he wants to scream his throat raw saying, and when words fail him, sign with his hands until he loses all of his strength. </p><p> </p><p>Maybe, if he asked them enough times, they’d finally give him an answer. Annoy them into giving him what he wants. </p><p> </p><p>He opens his mouth to ask, working up the gall to speak, when he sees it. </p><p> </p><p>Green. Just the barest flash of it, but in the near-white biege of this sand it sticks out more than Tommy in a crowd. </p><p> </p><p>Racing over, he ignores George and Sapnap’s shouts of alarm and confusion, dashing up a steep slope of sand and- wait, where is it? </p><p> </p><p>He saw green. There must be an oasis here, right? </p><p> </p><p>There is no water, no trees. Sapnap and George come up behind him, breathing slightly labored. </p><p> </p><p>“What is it?” Sapnap asks, sounding curious. </p><p> </p><p>Nope. Nope-ty nope-ty no. Dream is not going crazy, nope, not at all. The heat is just playing tricks on him. </p><p> </p><p>“Nothing,” Dream answers, turning away from the bare sand. He grasps the straps of his bag and starts back in the direction they were going. “Just thought I saw something.” </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Green. Again. This time, Dream is less eager to walk over, blinking twice, and then thrice. There it is. There is actually water in front of him this time. After a few seconds, in which George and Sapnap have wandered over, confused and a little wary, he throws himself into the water without warning. </p><p> </p><p>Yes! He wants to shout, relishing the cool water on his skin. Finally, rest! Trees, come sit under the shade. </p><p> </p><p>The others look blankly at the greenery he’s gestured to. Sapnap opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. </p><p> </p><p>What are you waiting for? Don’t tell me you actually like being hot out there. </p><p> </p><p>George is the one who draws nearer, obvious concern on his face. “What do you mean, Dream?” </p><p> </p><p>“What do I mean?” Dream parrots, scowling playfully. Something in the back of his head screams at him to stop. “Have you hit your head, George? There’s water right here! Sapnap, you believe me, right?” </p><p> </p><p>He turns to said man, the same man who’d threatened to kill him if he tried to hurt George, and pouts at the horrified expression creeping onto his face. </p><p> </p><p>George mutters something too quiet for Dream to hear. Sapnap nods sharply, glancing sideways at the shorter man before looking back at Dream, dropping his sword. </p><p> </p><p>YES!! They’re going to join him in the water, oh, the water feels so good, it’s so cold and refreshing and dry and cold and- </p><p> </p><p>Wait. </p><p> </p><p>Dry? </p><p> </p><p>And just like that, the oasis is gone. In its place is sand and sand and sand and- </p><p> </p><p>Where is the water? What’s going on? </p><p> </p><p>George and Sapnap seem to know he’s realized because they both lunge toward him, hands outstretched to grab whatever part of him they can before his inevitable freakout.  </p><p> </p><p>-But they’re too late. Dream is out of the sand and dashing across it a quarter-second before they land. His feet stutter on the unstable terrain, weak from the constant strain of walking, sometimes running, for so long and so far. </p><p> </p><p>“Stop! Dream!” One of them shouts – Dream doesn’t care to discern who, because at that exact moment his foot catches on a rut in the ground and sends him tumbling face-first into the grainy sand.  </p><p> </p><p>It feels like he’s been slammed back into his body, whereas he’d been hovering above it before; he can feel the burning in his lungs, the sand in his face. The bone-deep exhaustion in his arms, and the relative soreness that covers his entire body in a blanket of pain and the need for sleep. </p><p> </p><p>It shoves into him all at once, and sudden tears prick his eyes as he pulls his face out of the sand, desperate for breath. </p><p> </p><p>George crashes onto his back a moment later, effectively driving any air out of his deprived lungs and taking a hold of his arms. Dream debates bucking his hips to take the older off of him, but disregards the idea. It won’t do him much help to struggle, especially if he wants to get out of this stupid desert anytime soon. </p><p> </p><p>Sapnap comes along a second after, pinning down his legs and eliminating any chance of it altogether.  </p><p> </p><p>Is he crazy now? Has he officially been labelled insane? Is this what it’s like to be crazy, insane? </p><p> </p><p>“Cool. I’m completely immobilized. What now?” Dream asks over the voices in his head, just a tad bitterly, and waggling his sore toes and fingers in the sand for emphasis.  </p><p> </p><p>George mutters something that sounds an awful lot like ‘This is stupid’ to Sapnap. Dream chuckles in spite of himself. </p><p> </p><p>“I promise I won’t run off if you let me go,” he says, waiting, wanting, prompting them to respond. Dream doesn’t do well with the silent treatment, especially since he’s gotten about zed answers while he’s been with George and Sap, and his skin is positively teeming with the need to know, to plan, to have some semblance of control of his situation. </p><p> </p><p>...Maybe they were right not to answer him. </p><p> </p><p>There’s a minute or more of straight silence between them, as George and Sapnap undoubtedly converse via hand-motions and gestures behind his back. Then they both tentatively lift their holds on him, slowly standing up – Dream notices with a melancholy burst of estrangement that they places themselves around him in a way that would harbor most of his attempts to run. </p><p> </p><p>Right. He’s still their enemy here, in this time, at this place, so far away from the SMP and yet still haunted by what remains of it. </p><p> </p><p>If Dream thought they loved him before, he was confused now. The looks they were giving him didn’t show anything - while Dream’s face had always been expressive to the point of betrayal, George’s was carefully controlled, Sapnap’s often misleading. </p><p> </p><p>He loathes them for a second, at the way they can cover up the way they feel with something as simple as the twitch of a muscle. And then regrets it, because it’s not their fault he’s fallen prey to the dependency of a mask on his face to hide himself behind. </p><p> </p><p>He wishes he had his mask right about now, so he could hide his scarred, bare face from those whose judgement matters most.  </p><p> </p><p>George walks away after a long, tense moment of expectance; of Dream to explain (he won’t), and of George and Sapnap to finally talk to Dream (they won’t). </p><p> </p><p>Sapnap waits for him to follow, and then trails behind him, just like before. </p><p> </p><p>They don’t speak of the encounter again. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Finally, after dusk has long approached, Sapnap shouts “Land!” as if they were at sea, travelling for weeks aboard a boat with no civilization in sight. As if they hadn’t been surrounded by it since they woke up that morning. </p><p> </p><p>Dream dashes over the last stretch of desert with renewed fervor as George slaps the youngest across the head. He spots a nearby pond in time with Sapnap dramatically yelling “OW!!!” and has already thrown himself, clothed and all, into the pool of greenish-blue water by the time they catch up with him. </p><p> </p><p>Sapnap strips his top and bandanna off before following, childishly cannonballing into the middle of the spring. George sits on a little overhang above the water, dipping his toes in and using a rag to cleanse his dirtiest spots. </p><p> </p><p>Twenty minutes later, Dream regrets his decision not to pause and strip himself before entering the water – freezing cold and in soaking wet clothes, he shivers as Sapnap finishes playing around and the three search for shelter for the remainder of the night. </p><p> </p><p>A few spiders and the odd skeleton are scattered about, and it’s with much peril they find a shallow cave that can house them for the evening – or early morning? Dream’s not sure. </p><p> </p><p>“This is cozy,” Sapnap spits sarcastically as they set up camp, shimmying into his trousers. </p><p> </p><p>“Would you like to stay outside instead?” Dream can’t help but chime, gesturing to the open mouth of the cavern, through which they can glimpse a few zombies lingering about. </p><p> </p><p>“it’s what we’ve got,” George says diplomatically.  </p><p> </p><p>“So basically, what you’re saying is that what we’ve got is garbage,” says Sapnap.  </p><p> </p><p>Dream quietly agrees, sparking a fire with some flint he’d found beside the pond. </p><p> </p><p>“it’s what we’ve got,” George seethes between his teeth, attaching some mutton to a rotisserie stick. </p><p> </p><p>Sapnap scoffs, deciding to drop it and focus on re-tying the bandanna around his head. </p><p> </p><p>It’s quiet as they set out their sleeping bags, George taking up first post this time and sitting at the entrance to their cave. Sapnap settles down easily enough, and in a few minutes his breathing evens out in the tell-tale sign of sleep. </p><p> </p><p>Dream lays down, but he does not sleep. Instead, he mulls over the events of the day and his own hallucinatory attack.  </p><p> </p><p>Hours pass quickly. George wakes Sapnap for his shift at what must be near two hours past midnight. Dream does not pretend to wake until an hour before dawn, picking his way past the scattered possessions the others had dropped on the floor and waking George with a small shoulder-pat. </p><p> </p><p>The morning goes as usual. Dream gathers their belongings and places them back into their packs, while Sapnap leaves to refill their canteens and George prepares food. </p><p> </p><p>“We’re low on meat,” George comments, tying the satchel back together. “I’m going to save it for later, if we really need it.”  </p><p> </p><p>He passes Sapnap a piece of food. The youngest scarfed it down the moment he got it, already whining about how “stingy” George is being with their meagre rations when the older denies him another morsel. </p><p> </p><p>Dream has just finished tying off his satchel, axe in hand, and moves to accept the food from George’s outstretched hand, gratefully taking the- oh. </p><p> </p><p>Oh, indeed, because what he’s holding in his hand, like acid burning his skin, is bread. </p><p> </p><p>Suddenly, Dream is not standing in front of his friends, leaving the dank cavern and starting out on a new day. No, instead he’s in a room covered in blackish purple, staring at the flowing lava that burns his eyes and leaves spots in his vision.  </p><p> </p><p>Suddenly, he’s back to the place where black, burning obsidian scorched his back, when he would sweat and sweat until he couldn’t anymore, and bread or potatoes would spout from the dispenser, molding and rotting to dust beside the wall. </p><p> </p><p>Hands grasp his shoulders. A muffled voice sounds from somewhere to his right, and another, shriller, one right in front of him.  </p><p> </p><p>Dream is underwater. He must be, because everything feel muted and slow and warbled. He knows that he should be paying attention, should be defending himself, in some way, some form, but he can’t get his arms or legs to move. </p><p> </p><p>His tongue feels leaden, dry and swollen. His brain is screaming alarm bells in his head, but his body just won’t compute. The sounds get louder, more urgent, and the hands on his shoulders have started shaking him, frantically, back and forth, and back and forth- </p><p> </p><p>Then, like cold water has been poured all over his body, Dream moves. A flash of blue fabric, a shout, and Dream is scrambling backwards until his back hits the stone of the cave, because- </p><p> </p><p>George is cradling his face, blood leaking from his mouth. Sapnap is running at him, yanking him by the front of his shirt and pressing him up against the wall, where his feet can barely touch the ground beneath. </p><p> </p><p>Heart hammering in his chest, Dream stutters through his words, fumbling over them like he’d been stumbling over the sand in the desert. Sapnap barely pays mind to him, yelling to George and making sure the shortest is okay, and only lets Dream down towards the ground to secure a rope around his wrists. </p><p> </p><p>Dream guiltily glances at George’s swelling cheek, a mixture of fear and shame running rampant within his chest. The bruise has already starting to form, casting a good half of George’s jaw a sickly shade of blue-purple. </p><p> </p><p>I did that, thinks Dream. I did that, I punched him, when he was just trying to help me. </p><p> </p><p>Sapnap makes no attempt to hide his ire, knotting the rope around his hand a little tighter than necessary. He yanks Dream along with the tail end of it, held in his own white-knuckled grasp. </p><p> </p><p>George takes the time to wipe his face off with the cool water from the little spring, and then they set off again, this time with Dream tied at the wrists and Sapnap shoving him along, sword glinting menacingly. </p><p> </p><p>Dream deserves it, he knows he does. He hurt his friend, his friend who was trying to help and got punched in return. </p><p> </p><p>He hasn’t changed, has he? Dream hasn’t changed at all. He's still hurting his friends for no reason, hurting them and forcing them to tie him up so he can’t do it again. </p><p> </p><p>The sun is hot on his back, but his actions are what make him miserable. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Night falls. They’ve made their way to the bare outskirts of a staiga biome, and the overgrown spruces tower around the edges invitingly. Sapnap checks the knots around Dream’s wrists, which have now started chafing against the rough material, stinging from the gathered sweat. </p><p> </p><p>George starts a fire, and Sapnap ties him to a large, sturdy tree. He’s already removed any weapons Dream can carry from his person, but still checks again anyways. Then he makes sure there aren’t any particularly sharp-looking sticks around. </p><p> </p><p>Sapnap takes first shift, taking his post right in front of Dream, glaring angrily. Dream is so exhausted that he doesn’t even care – he simply falls right into a fitful, light, sleep, tied to the tree. </p><p> </p><p>The next morning, he awakes to a bright blue sky shining down, and neither George nor Sapnap are in sight. </p><p> </p><p>Panic slots itself into his chest.  </p><p> </p><p>They’ve left. They’ve left him here, tied to the tree. The SMP members are going to look for him, aren’t they? They’re going to find him.  </p><p> </p><p>Maybe they just left him here so that he could be completely tired and exhausted for the others to take him easily. </p><p> </p><p>No. That wouldn’t make sense. Maybe they just got tired of his issues and ran to wherever it is they’re going and left him alone. </p><p> </p><p>Isn’t that what he wanted? </p><p> </p><p>No, Dream shot down bitterly. What I wanted was freedom, not this stupid rope and this stupid tree and no friends. </p><p> </p><p>Well. They’ve left him. He just needs a way out of these bonds, and he can.... what? Start anew? Again? Just like he’s been doing for years, decades, now? </p><p> </p><p>No, Dream won’t begin again. He’s going to wander back to the SMP on blistered feet, and beg for them to throw him back into the prison because at least there he’s made a home, where he know he won’t be judged and hated and he won’t hurt anyone there but himself. </p><p> </p><p>And then, almost as if sent by his thoughts alone, George steps into view, a basket in hand and fishing rod in the other. Sapnap appears just after, holding the same. </p><p> </p><p>George unties Dream’s rope from the tree while Sapnap distributes what must be lunch, considering the time of day.  </p><p> </p><p>“Come on, not much farther to go,” George urges, tugging Dream’s rope twice and dragging him along. Sapnap stations himself in the back, as always, and the three-man-caravan make their steady way west. </p><p> </p><p>“Why did we start so late?” Asks Dream, yawning.  </p><p> </p><p>Sapnap doesn’t respond, and George hums non-committedly.  </p><p> </p><p>A long pause, then, and Dream figures that’s about as much answer as he’ll get when George speaks. </p><p> </p><p>“We needed food, and it was easier not to take you along.” </p><p> </p><p>It sounded like a lie – a thinly disguised one at that, but Dream is in no position to be able to call out his friends’ obvious dishonesty. So, he shuts up, and they continue walking. </p><p> </p><p>Dream smells the smoke before he sees it, spiraling above even the tallest of the trees. And then the sound of bustling, busy people, and the unintelligible, garbled, grunts of Villager Common.  </p><p> </p><p>A village, then. This is where they’ve been headed, all this time? A village? </p><p> </p><p>Anticlimactic, really, but Dream supposes he should have learned by now never to not expect that. </p><p> </p><p>George transfers his rope to Sapnap and pulls out a map Dream didn’t even know they had with them.  </p><p> </p><p>“Yup, this is it,” George hums appreciatively, looking out at the bare glimpses of taiga huts between the tree branches. </p><p> </p><p>“We’re here.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thanks for being so patient, my friends! Updates should resume to normal now - I can't say they'll always be on time, but they should be sooner, at least.</p><p>Commenting? Kudos? Subscribing? Helping me? Never!!</p><p>Special thanks to Nicht, for being a super cool and constant fan, troubles and all &lt;3</p><p>Expect updates soon :)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. The Cost Of War (And The Price Of Love)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>“I missed you so much,” Drista claims sorrowfully, once he’s delicately set her down, eyes watery and voice thick. </p><p>“I missed you too, Dris,” Dream responds, hugging her once more to hide the prick of his own tears threatening to overflow. The words unspoken between them weigh more heavily than any anvil ever could.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>flashback chapter pog?? this was a doozy to write! so glad i'm not going to regret this :D /s</p><p>not proofread, honestly i can't bring myself to read another word of this today but i wanted to get it up.</p><p>songs for this chapter: '911' by Elise, 'Die A Little' by YUNGBLUD, and 'silence is all i have now' by Kurt Hugp Schneider (out of all the songs, please listen to this one!!!)</p><p>also, this is like, 1k words short, so uh, sorry i guess??</p><p>-love, asy &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Before</p><p>“Hey, Dris, whatch’ya doing?” </p><p>“Things too complicated for your simple brain to comprehend, my dear dolt of a brother.”</p><p>“Between you and I, aren’t you supposed to be the nice one?”</p><p>A scoff. “Yeah, right, and get called goody-two-shoes? Come off it, Dream, being nice is boring,” Drista accentuates, popping one last dot onto the wall. She throws an impish grin Dream’s way. “Why be good when you can have fun instead?”</p><p>The older deigns not to answer, instead scrutinizing the bright green smiley face drawn on the inn’s front entrance. “You’re gonna get in so much trouble for this.’</p><p>“You mean, we’re going to get in so much trouble for this.”<br/>
Drista innocently bats her eyelashes at him.</p><p>“Nuh-uh, no way. Nope, nope-ty no. I will not be involved in your crimes against humanity.” To prove his point, Dream steps back, crossing his arms.</p><p>“Well, you didn’t exactly stop me,” the girl responds. “That can at least get you assistance in a crime.”</p><p>“It’s not like I could’ve done much good anyways, you little weasel.”</p><p>Drista puts on her best, brightest grin. “But, my dear stinky brother, the jury won’t know that.”</p><p>“Oh my god,” Dream sighs exasperatedly, dragging a hand across his face in a dramatic display of irritance. “I can never win with you.” </p><p>And then, after a pause: “You ever consider becoming a lawyer?”</p><p> </p><p>“Nice of you to show up,” Drista greets sarcastically, not even glancing Dream’s way. Her perch on the low-hanging branch of an ancient oak allows her to stay completely hidden, and yet with the perfect vantage point for spying or eavesdropping. The leaves are a bright shade of neon green, almost hideous to look at. </p><p>Dream’s clothing is too dark to hide in them, but maybe if he were to camouflage himself….</p><p>Drawing himself up to his sister, Dream sets himself down beside her, absentmindedly picking at the bark beneath his fingertips.</p><p>“Sorry, Dris, it’s not like I don’t want to see you. They’re not too lenient with vacation days.” </p><p>Dream has been training for almost a year now, since he was thirteen, and yet he’s only been allowed home a whopping total of four times. It’s not the worst, considering most soldiers have gone decades without seeing their loved ones, but still a cost no one wants to bear.</p><p>Except, if- if Dream can endure this – the training, the fighting, the loneliness – then Drista, the only person he has left to love in this life, won’t have to. The Admins had allowed it, only because Dream had begged and pleaded and bargained and cried until he couldn’t anymore to get it.</p><p>Maybe the Admins are in favor of him, since they were so agreeable with his demands. Perhaps the gods, if there be any, saw the meagre blessings in which his life had been graced with and took pity on their harrowed faces and skeletal frames.</p><p>Whatever reasons it may be, Dream will enlist with the army for however long it takes, do whatever needs to be done, so that Drista will have a safe, dry place to sleep and food to fill her belly. The board they offer is overcrowded and the gruel they feed is little more than what the farmers feed to their cows, but the allowance they offer lends him plenty to give Drista all she needs.</p><p>	It’s miserable and overcrowded and horribly lonely, but it’s worth it, because Drista has room to grow, to be happy, without ever having to experience the trauma and difficulty demanded of the average child her age.</p><p>	“Yeah, well, I still wish you could come more often. The boarding school here is nice, but it’s not as nice as home,” Drista says, jolting Dream out of his thoughts.</p><p>	“You know I can’t.”</p><p>	“But I wish you could.”</p><p>	“Me too.”</p><p> </p><p>	There’s something wrong here, Dream can feel it. </p><p>	It’s midnight. Late for anyone to be awake, and far too late for anyone to leave the barracks. An ungodly hour, in which everyone is sleeping and the moon is glistening. Dream listens to the faint thud of footsteps and silently creeps after, careful to remain behind the various belongings cluttered around the corridor.</p><p>	It’s obvious that whoever it is has ill intentions in mind – otherwise, it wouldn’t be a secret – and Dream has dug himself into the rut of figuring out just what it is they’re up to.</p><p>	After what feels like forever, of criss-crossing hallways and treading down narrow halls, the mischief-maker stops. </p><p>	A figure emerges from the shadows, in front of Dream’s follow-ee, and the words they exchange are too quiet for his raptly attuned ears to pick up. </p><p>	Something’s wrong, here. Why else would this person – a general in the ranks – be sneaking out past hours to speak to an unknown?</p><p>	He’s a traitor, Dream’s brain supplies, and he’s inclined to agree. This is wrong, this is all sorts of twisted and corrupt. What Dream just witnessed, what he’s just been privy to, could be the matter of life and death – and he hasn’t a clue how.</p><p>	The secret gathering is held quickly, and Dream hastens to make it back to the bunks before someone catches wind that not one, but two of the soldiers in rank are not in their beds, as they should be.</p><p>	Dream makes it back underneath his blanket and is sound asleep before he can even think of waiting for the general to make it back.</p><p>	The next morning, he will find that the general had never made it back to bed; instead, he wakes early, ready to begin his morning chores, and stumbles upon the man’s body, bloodied and mangled.</p><p>	The killer has long gone, leaving nothing but the body in his wake. I could have stopped this, Dream bitterly confides to himself, and shouts to alert the others of the tragedy. </p><p>	The culprit is never found.</p><p> </p><p>	It’s no surprise that the first real friend Dream finds in the army is none other than his greatest rival in combat.</p><p>Perhaps ‘friend’ is too close a term to describe his relationship with his quarry, because they hardly carry out any conversation or do anything a traditional friendship would describe, but they cast nods to each other in passing, and that’s the most tender form of endearment Dream has experienced in his three years serving in the army.</p><p>There’s not a whole lot of activity around this time of year, though the Admins have made it clear that no soldier with a mite of ability will be left at home. Whispers of war traverse their way through the ranks, and with the opposing side threatening their ranks, it only makes sense that the soldiers are being drafted into the ranks like a bee to its queen.</p><p>So far, though, whoever is in charge has held up to their promise in keeping Drista out of the ranks, so that’s at least a small comfort. He wonders, often, what makes him so special that they’d be willing to go to such lengths to appease his conditions. Is he destined to be some great leader? Have they prophesied his great victories?</p><p>The answer is known not to him, but Dream can hardly care at the moment, not when training is so vigorous and grueling that he can barely manage to keep his eyes open long enough to make it to bed at night. </p><p>Plenty of soldiers have loudly voiced their discontent, as volunteering becomes commandeering, and free-will turns into capture. Many have attempted escape, to try and flee to far servers where no war is held, but Dream has not heard of any that have gotten away.</p><p>The price of war is a heavy one, and as Dream advances in his training he is elected to teach the newer, fresher rookies and whip them into shape. They’re uncoordinated and snarky, freshly ripped from their homes and cast into the castle-turned-dungeon with little time to say goodbye. </p><p>They’ve plenty of reason to disobey and act out and scream at him for the unfairness of it all, even if Dream is just like them, only quieter – but he punishes them accordingly for unruliness, and soon their resentment transforms into respect for his quickness and surety. </p><p>This is far from the future Dream had inspired in himself when he’d first joined the ranks, but- he has, after all this time, still gotten what he wanted most; Drista is still free to live her life outside of stone brick walls and dark corridors, and so in the army he will remain until that changes.</p><p>So when he’d be tasked with more and more duties, training soldiers, discussing battle plans, constantly berated to keep your sights ahead, soldier, he takes it with as much dignity as he can. He’s got what he wants, there’s nothing more he needs. </p><p>Dream is not happy, but Drista is, and that’s all that matters.</p><p> </p><p>“Dream!” Is the only warning he gets before small, lithe arms wrap around his torso and squeeze him tightly. Something wet presses up against his upper back and he knows Drista is crying even before he turns around.</p><p>He pries her fingers off of his torso, only to bend down and swing her up into his arms, pressing her tightly against his chest as if she might disappear should he let her go.</p><p>A giggle rumbles from her frame, and Dream feels it resonate in his own chest with a warm, tingly feeling. Dream doesn’t let her go, still, and holds her until he can feel her sigh and go limp in his grip – a signal that she’s hugged herself out, prominent even in the years since he left.</p><p>“I missed you so much,” Drista claims sorrowfully, once he’s delicately set her down, eyes watery and voice thick. </p><p>“I missed you too, Dris,” Dream responds, hugging her once more to hide the prick of his own tears threatening to overflow. The words unspoken between them weigh more heavily than any anvil ever could.</p><p>Dream has only a few hours before he has to be back – actually, he’s supposed to be in the tower right now, but the officials won’t be by until dusk, so he’s got some time to kill. Besides, this will probably be the last time he’ll see Drista’s face before he’ll be sent off to the frontlines, so he’ll relish it as much as he can.</p><p>He takes her down the street and to the markets, where plenty of stalls and storekeepers are more than happy to sell him their finest food. It helps that Dream has a little more money to spend than the average city-dweller, too.</p><p>“This is the best food I’ve had in a while,” Drista says around a bite of steak. They both know that Dream sends her enough money each month to afford it, and he helpfully points that out. “Well yeah, thanks I guess, but the mistress hardly allows us to leave the school.”</p><p>“I’m sure she’s not all that bad,” Dream comments, thinking of times where he begged and pleaded with the counsel to allow him just one vacation day to see her. Thinking of how badly he’ll be whipped for disobeying direct orders, and thinking of how, in this rare, peaceful, moment, he couldn’t bring himself to care any less.</p><p>“Yeah, well, she’s a real proper hag, that’s what.”</p><p>Dream chuckles good-naturedly. “I’m sure you’d say that about my superiors, too.” It was borderline treason to talk about the government in such a way, especially so in public, but it felt strangely nice to be a little disorderly and take a risk for once.</p><p>“I do. I just don’t say it in front of you.”</p><p> </p><p>The hours pass sooner than Dream would’ve liked, but as the sun reaches the quarter-mark an hour before dusk, he dolefully walks Drista back to the school and mutters a bitter, heartfelt goodbye.</p><p>Drista throws herself around his neck, weeping a pool into the hard, plated armor of his chest. “Why do you have to go?” She croaks, borderline inaudible, but Dream hears it all the same. </p><p>He stays silent. They both know the answer.</p><p>If he could’ve, Dream would hold her in that embrace forever. But he can’t, he knows he can’t, and he’s going to run late if he’s not leaving in the next few minutes. He presses a loving kiss to her cheek, tasting the salt of her tears on his lips, and holds her close, wiping her eyes with calloused thumbs.</p><p>“I love you, Dris, don’t you ever forget that,” he utters under his breath, like he’s just told her the world’s greatest secret, only for her ears.</p><p>“I love you too,” she chokes out, nearing a sob. Wordlessly, a small, white circle is placed in his scarred hands. The other side, once revealed, has a small, smiley face on it. “Take it,” she pleads. “Take it so you’ll always remember to come home to me.”</p><p>The Admins won’t do with him having personal possessions. They’re already going to be furious with his subordinance, and such a precious gift on his person would only be marred by his failure. They might break it just for retribution.</p><p>He tentatively pushes it back into her small, petite, hands, glancing up at her apologetically. “Keep it, for now.” He stands, patting her head gently. “That way, I’ll have to come back to you to get it.”</p><p>He smiles, but it’s not a happy one. Drista grimaces back.</p><p>This could be the last time he sees her. The possibility of his death in the inevitable war is a very high one. Dream could die and battle and she would be left to fend for herself.</p><p>He pushes the thought of out his mind with the resolve that no, he’s not going to let himself be killed. He’d rather be tortured from limb to limb as long as he can come back to her.</p><p>Dream bids farewell with tears stinging his cheeks, twenty minutes from dusk, and runs all the way back to his tower without looking back.</p><p> </p><p>War breaks out sooner than expected, and after four and a quarter year’s training, Dream is forced to make his first kill. It’s quick and merciful, a hasty stab to the throat, but it leaves him sobbing into his pillow that evening, covered in the blood and gore still.</p><p>The next day, he carries on, instructing the others as always. If he’s a little tense and more tightlipped than usual, no one comments. It’s not like anyone’s in the position to care about that, anyway, not with the war happening right before their eyes, and most certainly not with his current state of mandatory standoffishness.</p><p>The next few battles are vigorous, and the enemy (Dream doesn’t even know their name, and he’s expected to fight against them) has gained the advantage, of which they do not fail to press. He comes back with less and less good men, left with the tattered and war-torn remains to stitch back together.</p><p>In one such events, he takes 30 of his most elite troops to conquer a small outpost that had been sieged from neutral position; that evening, he walks home with five men and nothing more.</p><p>The Admins don’t let up on the pressure. Constantly, more and more men lose their lives, and constantly, more and younger men are inducted into the ranks for him to train. Most of the veterans have either been smart enough to escape or stupid enough to get killed, and Dream sneaks out of his bunk to scream at the wall in the garden that night.</p><p>The next day, he wakes, stretches, and starts again.</p><p> </p><p>Commander Dream has gained a name in the ranks by now, and many soldiers seek him out in the halls to discuss training maneuvers and tactics. He gains his own room two months into the fallout, and yet again, he’s forced to wonder how much money this government has to spend on him that they can’t afford to feed the starving public.</p><p>Guilt weighs across his shoulders, and Dream hastens to bury himself in the studies of war and battle and strategies. He sleeps very little each night, obsessed with finding an advantage, and when he does his dreams are filled with blurry faces of the men he’d never bothered to know before slaughtering them.</p><p>His ‘friend’ becomes just like the others, and while many people now hold him in respect and regard him with politeness, Dream becomes a commander to them and nothing more. The soldiers will find friends between themselves, and to remain tacit and hold respect, he must maintain his distance.</p><p>The loneliness is awfully bitter, for even those he knew the names of cower before him, and Dream revels in the isolation of power.</p><p>Drista’s face, once so clear, becomes blurry and warped in his memory. He hasn’t seen her since the war started, and the pang of homesickness and worry only lets itself out when he’s sure no one else can see.</p><p>It’s terrible, this feeling of paranoia that has started to leave him restless and double-checking the halls before he walks. Anger thrums beneath his skin, uncontainable and festering. Dream longs for a worthy opponent to enact it upon – none comes, because no one can defeat The Dream in combat, now.</p><p>Dream watches his pupils grow, weeds out the weak ones, and strengthens those pliable enough to mold into shape. He leads more and more out of the frontline, and the Admins have left battle strategies and formations up to his scrutiny. The workpile never stops, not once, and Dream is not allowed a breath without thinking about his next move against the opposing army.</p><p>He’s going to break soon. He knows this, the Admins know this, and it’s a terribly dreadful feeling of knowing that the moment he snaps he will become useless, a broken tool that has lost its purpose.</p><p>Just a little longer, he promises himself. Just a little longer, and you can see Drista again.</p><p> </p><p>The people, feeling that their voices are unheard, turn in on themselves. Dream is forced to deploy many of good rank into the city to control the riots and prevent more damage to be done. Neighborhoods have been cast aflame, and hoards of angry villagers have forced their way into shops and innocent homes.</p><p>Dream has been ordered to stop them, as a superior officer, but ordinance is the least of his worries. </p><p>The boarding school isn’t far from the destruction, and Dream wastes no time in dashing off to get there in time. Rescue Drista, if need be, and get her to safety. That’s his priority, orders be damned. She’s the reason he’s even fighting here, the only thing keeping him grounded, and he intends on keeping it that way.</p><p>It’s too late. He knows this by the screams and shouts that eminate from the building, even a hundred meters away. Fire tears through every crevice of the schoolhouse, and the dorms have been ransacked and destroyed in the flame. Among those standing around and watching in horror, Dream can’t find his little sister.</p><p>Something in him snaps, the irrefutable despair growing a deep chasm in his chest, and Dream grabs the nearest girl, a friend of Drista’s, he remembers, seizing her shoulders and interrogating her where Drista might be.</p><p>Shakily, she points at the raging inferno, and Dream is dashing through an open window and screaming his little sister’s name at the top of his lungs. Smoke pervades in his lungs, clouding his vision and making it hard to breathe.</p><p>“Drista!” he cries, storming through the halls and schoolrooms, searching for her.</p><p>The pit in his stomach grows into an abyss, and when Dream finds the ceiling of her dorm caved in, there’s nothing to stop the unadulterated hatred coursing through his veins.</p><p>“DRISTA!!!” He screams, tearing through the wreckage and searching for any sign, any at all, that his little sister isn’t dead and somehow got away safely.</p><p>And then, he spots it. The familiar sleeve of purple clothing is enough to drive him to tears, but the small, white mask clutched in her burnt hand does it. The black, neat smiley face glares back at him accusingly, and Dream forces himself to look at the rest of her body.</p><p>Snarky, energetic, and full of life; those are the words Dream had always associated with her. Now, though, that he’s staring at the small, blackened body of the only person he’d ever loved, all he can think of is hurt.</p><p>He can’t carry her body out of here, not with the building still a raging inferno, so he does what he can. With a dagger, he slices off a lock of her hair and snips a piece of her smoldering shirt sleeve. The smiley mask is an afterthought.</p><p>Dream exits through the gaping hole in the wall left by the ceiling’s support beam, and he doesn’t bother looking back. The fire will eat her body away, and there will never be anything here for him anymore.</p><p>Drista is dead.</p><p>Commander Dream Was Taken vanishes from the army and is assumed dead the following day.</p><p> </p><p>“Hey, you!” </p><p>Dream turns, careful to keep his hand on the hidden axe within his cloak. A man, looking rugged and worn, haggles his way over.</p><p>“You’re from the Armada server, aren’t ya? I’d recognize that face anywhere.”</p><p>Dream blanches. His grip on the axe goes white-knuckled, and his jaw clenches so hard his teeth hurt. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”</p><p>“Oh, sure you do!” The man cackles giddily. “Left that place before the war ended. So, tell me, boy, did ya win? I’d assume so, considerin’ yer still standin’ here.”</p><p>Dream left the Armada six months ago. Since then, he’s stayed at the main hub, flitting between servers and looting what he can. There’s not much to say toward a crook, but he tries to take only what he needs, and only from those who can truly afford the loss.</p><p>Dream has nothing to say to this- this man, this drunkard, who wants the latest bit of gossip from one of the hub’s most controversial servers. He turns away, intending to vanish out of sight, and a hand grips his shoulder threateningly.</p><p>“I asked you a question, boy, an’ I don’t take too kindly to bein’ disrespected.”</p><p>Danger danger danger threat threat threat-</p><p>Dream lashes out before he can blink, smacking the man’s head with the blunt end of the axe and booking it down the street. He disappears into the nearest alleyway and emerges on the other side skittish and paranoid.</p><p>Surely, he can’t get away forever. The army will find him again if he stays here, with his face and his reputation hanging over his head. Dream needs a change, and he needs it now. </p><p>He’s got nothing on him. He just spent his last few emeralds on some bread, and though he can always find some merchant to sneak more off of, the last thing he needs is to be spotted again, especially so soon.</p><p>He pats himself over, panting harshly and counting doubles to keep himself from having a freakout. Now is not the time. He’d vowed that, after Drista, he would never attach himself to anything that could be used against him ever again. That means that he’s never really been all that materialistic, and since he’s a nomad he’s got to carry himself on light feet anyways, an aspect which is only heightened by his apparent runner status.</p><p>The only thing he has on him is- is the mask. The one Drista had clutched in her hands as she breathed her last breath, whether killed by the smoke or the fire first is beyond his knowledge. </p><p>The white smiley face glares back at him eerily, like it’s staring through his soul. Marred and soot-covered as it is, it’ll have to do, and it’s with a sense of shame and guilt Dream straps it to his face using a piece of leather from his inventory.</p><p>He looks creepy and out of place as he joins the crowded street again, and it draws more attention than he’s comfortable with, but- it’s all he has, and it will keep him from being recognized, at least, for now, and that’s all he really needs.</p><p>Blending into the shadows was something he’d learned early in training, before the Armada had been so hard-pressed for soldiers in their employ, and even now it proves useful as he flits in and about the various dark opportunities that present themselves.</p><p>Dream leaves the hub with nothing but the clothes on his back, the bag in his hands, and a whiteish gray mask on his face.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>thanks to donnyglover for this chapter!</p><p>i'm going to go die for a little, and hopefully next week i can get the next chapter out - AND it'll be back to the present! no more having to make things up!! well, sorta, but less....ish.</p><p>don't forget to totally NOT comment, subscribe, or kudos, like, that totally doesn't help me at all &gt;:( how dare you think such a thing</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Do You Know Me? (Or Do I Know You?)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>DO YOU KNOW ME? Dream wants to scream, wants to yell and shout until his throat runs raw and his insides melt from the inside out. Do you know me? Did you ever? Was all this, all of me, just a ruse? Am I manipulating you right now, right under even my nose? Two weeks ago you weren’t even speaking to me, and now look at us, the roles reversed.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>wayyyy too short but my excuse for forever is that i am very sick and not feeling well enough to bother editing or adding more words to make this chapter more enjoyable lol</p><p>songs: 'What's Wrong?' by half-alive, 'empty crown' by YAS, and 'Guts' by Aidan Alexander</p><p>enjoy this mess of words &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“This is it?” Dream asks incredulously, looking at the disheveled huts and cabins that decorate the winding gravel path. </p><p>How anticlimactic. All this travelling, for this? After they’ve sojourned so far, so long, their destination this entire time was a measly little village in the outlands of the world. </p><p>Dream knows he should come to expect this, that he should have become accustomed to disappointment, but it still baffles him that all the impossible stress and constant worrying was over a simple little taiga community.</p><p>It's laughable, really, and if Dream were in a different time with different choices and different intentions, he would’ve. Instead, though, he just grimly presses his lips together and stands, resolute, waiting for his friends to make a move.</p><p>What’s more worrying is that Sapnap and George don’t even deign to answer, seizing the lead attached to his improvised handcuffs and nearly dragging him along after them. His skin chafes beneath the rough ties and his feet scuff on the uneven terrain.</p><p>Dream wants to scream. He wants to shout, to struggle out of his bonds and run far, far away to a land where no one can ever hurt him. But he doesn’t, because he knows that it will get him nowhere.</p><p>Dream is a selfish man to his core, always has been. Eventually, he’d find a way to lure more innocents into his garrot of manipulation. Or maybe it was a guillotine?</p><p>A tug on his bound wrists alerts him to George and Sapnap, who stare at him expectantly. </p><p>“What?” he snaps angrily.</p><p>“We’re here,” George states, tone void of any emotion.</p><p>Dream laughs bitterly. “You said that earlier,” he grits out. But his eyes track their gestures nonetheless, and he finds himself staring at a rather small, homely-looking cottage, with pale birch doors and spruce walls.</p><p>Soon after, Dream is shoved inside, aided oh-so-helpfully by Sapnap, who grins sadistically the whole way. The sharp glint to his malicious smile reminds Dream of a time that seems so long ago, when the three of them cursed L’Manburg and lit it ablaze in retribution.</p><p>“Ah, ah, don’t go pulling that spacey shit on me,” Sapnap chides in a serious tone – one of which that is brokered the moment a grin cracks across his face and he giddily attaches Dream’s lead to a grand oak chair.</p><p>From behind him, George slides more leads around his stomach, legs, and shoulders. The material is stiff and unforgiving, itching persistently at the place of contact. Dream subtly tests his bonds by tensing his muscles and relaxing them. </p><p>There’s no give, but that’s to be expected of some of the server’s most notorious hunters. Dream would’ve had to grow a second head to hope that his bonds were loose enough to slip out of.</p><p>“What now?” Dream sneers, angry and fed up with no answers. “You’re just gonna keep me tied up?”</p><p>At their lack of response, he growls, guttural and purely instinctual.</p><p>“If you were just going to tie me up again, I’d rather you left me in the prison.”</p><p>Neither of the other two say anything, and his head is being tilted back, a bottle pressed to his lips, before he can even think of fighting back. The liquid drains down his throat, and then the world turns black.</p><p> </p><p>“I hate you,” is the first sentence out of Dream’s mouth the second he realizes he has an audience again.</p><p>“Yeah, well, not much you can do about that now, huh?” Sapnap goads, smiling as Dream struggles at his bonds. He places a bag of assorted goods on the table across from the tied man and begins sorting them.</p><p>At the sight of the first item Sapnap pulls out – a plump, red, apple – Dream’s stomach mutinously decides to growl, rumbling loudly in a way that the other man no doubt heard. He’d not eaten anything since two evenings ago, before the bread incident that got him tied in this situation anyways.</p><p>“Oh, are you hungry?” A snappish, fiery grin is directed his way. Sapnap takes a mocking bite of the apple, chewing obnoxiously loud and swallowing with a satisfied “Ah, tastes so good.”</p><p>Dream scowls bitterly and looks at the plain birch floor, tracing the grains of the wood with his eyes until it’s scorched into his memory. The floor doesn’t deserve the nasty stare he gives it, but floors can’t feel hurt, so he does it anyways.</p><p>George enters the room, then, with dust in his hair and the faint smell of mushroom emanating. The bruise on his cheek, overnight, had blossomed into a blooming, angry black mark covering the better half of his face. On the same side, his eye is swollen and puffy, like a dyed marshmallow.</p><p>Dream looks away. He knows he caused that, he knows what he did. He deserves to be tied up, after that. Dangerous animals weren’t left to their own devices, were they? Why would he be any different?</p><p>His stomach growls again, aggravated. His chest cramps painfully in a way that lets him know his body is eating itself alive already, with no fat to consume beforehand. </p><p>“Sapnap!” George shouts suddenly, snatching the other’s hand and pulling it to him. “You haven’t given him anything to eat?!”</p><p>Dream searches the angry, concerned expression that sprawls across George’s face – the side that isn’t bruised like a human pinata – and wonders why George even bothers. It’s not like Dream will die or anything, he’s still got the-</p><p>Wait.</p><p>Dream- he doesn’t have the respawn anchor anymore.</p><p>If he threw himself off a cliff right now he wouldn’t wake up back in a filthy water hole, doomed to eternal life.</p><p>Dream could die.</p><p>“Fine, you dolt, just feed him something so he doesn’t starve!” George snaps, in tune to the jarring of Dream’s thoughts returning to the present. A loaf of bread is shoved into his still-bound hand and he struggles not to scream or shout or jolt back into his chair like he wants to.</p><p>Somewhere in the room, George sighs. “His hands are tied, how do you expect him to eat that?”</p><p>“I dunno, with his mouth?” </p><p>Then, the ties around his wrists and shoulders are slit. Dream fights the instinct to lash out again, to punch and scream and kick out at the two ex-friends before him. The bread in his hands burns to the touch, sears into his skin, branding him forever.</p><p>His muscles spasm involuntarily and the bread drops to the floor with a muted thud. George and Sapnap, who had returned to their bickering in lieu of watching him eat, turn to him with confused expressions.</p><p>His tongue turns to lead, and bile rises in his throat. How is he supposed to explain this? That he hates and loathes bread because it was all he was ever given to eat for weeks, maybe even months?</p><p>It’s so stupid. He’s so broken that he can’t even eat a baked mash of wheat. This- Dream thought he’d hit rock bottom weeks (months?) ago, when he first set foot on the condemning obsidian, but this? This- this is worse, this degrading feeling of being so shattered he can’t even take a bite of food without thinking about lava and death and lava and death and lava and death-</p><p>“Dream?” </p><p>Like a dam bursting, he’s back in his own body. George is snapping his fingers in front of his face like some kind of failed hypnotist, and back Before, when everything was simpler, Dream would’ve made a snide comment and laughed.</p><p>Now, though- well, Dream isn’t delusional enough to think he has any chance of getting that back.</p><p>His hand trembles, even as George bends down to grab the discarded loaf and toss it into the trash bin in the kitchen. Sapnap watches him with unguarded disdain, and, well, Dream doesn’t blame him.</p><p>He’s just wasted a good piece of food, all because of some stupid notion in his head that says he’s back in the prison, even when he’s about as far away from it as can be.</p><p>George walks back over shortly after, and it’s a strange sort of stalemate that exists in the air between them. Dream’s hands are still unbound, though his legs and torso are still tethered to the chair. George stares at him like he’s picking apart every last detail of Dream’s bare, naked face.</p><p>Fear unravels in his gut, coiling like a helpless viper and constricting his chest. Why is George looking at him like this? Does he finally recognize Dream’s face? Has he heard of the vanished commander of the Armada server and just now connected the dots?</p><p>He feels like he’s being vivisected, and the feeling doesn’t disappear even as George turns and grabs an apple from the satchel on the table. He places it delicately in Dream’s calloused and scarred hands, watching as the former dictator of the Greater SMP is reduced to eating at the allowance of his former best friends.</p><p>Dream takes a hesitant bite, and the flavor that fills his mouth is enough to make him cry, had he any tears left to shed (that was done long before, back in his first weeks in the prison when they wouldn’t visit him anymore and he was lost, so, so lost and wondering why he had to try and be better than everyone else, why he had to be so addicted to power that he couldn’t see the people he’d left behind in the pursuit of it).</p><p>Sapnap seems a bit peeved that George has elected, without prior discussion, to offer up another piece of their meagre rations to the one person who has caused the most turmoil in their incredibly short lives.</p><p>George, however, only watches Dream eat with an unreadable face. It’s almost like he understands, in some unspoken way that Dream will never be able to voice out loud, because he’s lost everyone and everything and still has the audacity to protect his dignity. </p><p>Dream has never been good at admitting his faults. That’s- that’s probably why he’d built up a reputation that he had, the untouchable mastermind behind the fall of L’Manberg and source of all chaos in the world.</p><p>After what feels like forever (and probably was, considering the impatient features sprawling themselves across Sapnap’s face), Dream finishes the apple and clenches the core tightly in his hand, unphased by the sticky juice running down his palm.</p><p>“So, anyone care to explain what the motherfucking FUCK that was??” Sapnap iterates angrily. His hand twitches toward the netherite sword on his belt.</p><p>Dream takes in a deep breath for lack of anything to say. He glances at George, hoping, begging for him to take the reins and direct the conversation to a better, safer, topic, because Dream is a walking landmine with hair-trigger impulses and anyone, anything, has to be treated like a threat or he’s DEAD-</p><p>Another deep breath. George is looking at him expectantly, and the stagnant pause continues for an indefinite amount of time.</p><p>They’re waiting for him to answer. He knows this. His tongue feels like lead, his heart is pounding, and sweat drips into his eyes despite the cool evening weather.</p><p>Dream licks his lips. There’s no way out of this one, not if he wants to have even a glimpse of getting out of these bounds. So, he swallows his pride, for one measly second, and mutters almost inaudibly: “I- I can’t eat the bread.”</p><p>Sapnap scoffs. “Why’s that?” he asks, because he has no sense of consideration for those who have wronged him and that’s exactly what Dream loves about him most.</p><p>George sends Sapnap a sharp look, one that says ‘Stop being an idiot’, but Dream finds himself answering the question anyways.</p><p>“It, uh-“ he chuckles even though no part of this is a laughing matter. “That’s… all they fed me in the prison.”</p><p>No one looks surprised. The split-second of hesitation that passes between them as they share a glance makes it apparent they believe he’s trying to garner their sympathy. </p><p>Right. Because everything Dream says has to have some sort of catch, some kind of ulterior motive, because he’s never allowed to not have a trick up his sleeve and be himself for once.</p><p>Nothing is ever said about it after that, not to his face at least. But he knows they fight and argue behind closed doors and during their frequent walks into the wood. He knows they go out in the middle of the night, past his resting form, just to catch a breath of fresh air from the other. He knows, he knows, he knows.</p><p>He knows it’s about him.</p><p>He knows because he’s never seen such pure, unadulterated, anger on their faces since Dream revoked George’s kingship, directed at him, for snatching away such a title and giving it back to Eret without so much as a backward glance at the hurt in his wake.</p><p>The unspoken “you’re not fit to be king,” rings through the air, even now as Dream looks at George’s face and all he can see is the purple, splotchy bruise that adorns his cheek like he’s just painted himself to look like Ranboo.</p><p>Because George and Sapnap are never ones to be cruel for longer than necessary, they cut the rest of his bonds within the week, and even then it seems as if Sapnap is willing to do it.</p><p>So far, it’s been just George, fighting tooth and nail for Dream’s freedom, to give him a second chance, because ‘he’s changed, Sapnap, can’t you see?’, but this- this is like the olive branch to Dream’s sunken Ark, doomed to sink, never to swim.</p><p>After that, it’s by mere chance Dream avoids any other pulled triggers. Each member of this cramped cottage is mandated a chore to complete, without fail, every day. Sapnap tends to the livestock, which is quite the surprise, given his past genocidal tendencies. George mans the inside chores, like washing dishes and keeping the house in a respectable shape. </p><p>Dream- well, he just flits around and does a bit of everything. If their makeshift crop farm needs tilling, he crafts a stone hoe and sets to work. The cottage, he finds, has been uninhabited for quite a while now, as a vacation home built by George and Sapnap to provide a safe place during the wars and fights and ceaseless panic that plagued the earth, and so he always has something to keep up with.</p><p>“We didn’t tell you about it,” Sapnap said one night, alone, because George will not speak to him now unless necessary. “I told him- I told George not to tell you, because I knew even then you were a conceited asshole and nothing has changed, has it?”</p><p>Dream stayed silent. There was nothing he could say to defend himself. You are condemned, a voice inside him whispers. You are exactly the monster they see you as.</p><p>“You can’t look me in the face, after all this time, and tell me you think everything’s just fine and fucking dandy! Tell me you look at this fucked-up situation and tell me you don’t feel the slightest bit guilty for somehow manipulating George into this!”</p><p>I didn’t, Dream wants to scream. I never wanted this. I never, ever, ever in a thousand years wanted this to happen. But he doesn’t. </p><p>What difference will it make?</p><p>“Oh, are you too good for me now? Don’t tell me you think I’ll buy your spacey shit any longer. George may believe it, but I’m smarter than that. I know you. You’re not gonna be shaken up by a few months in prison.”</p><p>DO YOU KNOW ME? Dream wants to scream, wants to yell and shout until his throat runs raw and his insides melt from the inside out. Do you know me? Did you ever? Was all this, all of me, just a ruse? Am I manipulating you right now, right under even my nose? Two weeks ago you weren’t even speaking to me, and now look at us, the roles reversed.</p><p>There’s so much to say, and nothing can force its way past the lump in his throat.</p><p>How- how is he supposed to make them understand? How is he supposed to tell them that he never wanted this, not even in his wildest dreams did he imagine this outcome, without sounding like he’s ploying at their humanity, tugging their heartstrings until they give in?</p><p>Sapnap leaves, furious at Dream’s stony silence; Dream sits at the entrance stairs to the cottage, picking at the bandages wrapped on his still-raw wrists and wincing at the miniscule bursts of pain the gesture elicits. </p><p>He can’t tell them. There’s no way to do it.</p><p>Suddenly, his body and his brain snap together again. His hand is raised, poised to knock on the distinct oak wood door that stands out so mis-matched against the grains of the surrounding dark oak walls. </p><p>George’s door, he thinks, and hopes beyond reason that he’s just stopped himself from performing a calamity worse than death.</p><p>Luck has never been in Dream’s favor, a fact that stands true as George opens the door then, bleary-eyed and looking all the part of a tornado’s aftermath.</p><p>“Dream?” he mumbles, still groggy in his half-awake, half-slumbering state. </p><p>Dream trembles. Why did he come here? What in the right world possessed him to come here?</p><p>“I- I’m sorry,” he mutters before he can think otherwise. “Go back to sleep.”</p><p>Embarassed, Dream turns to leave, red-faced and teary-eyed and so uncharacteristic of himself that his heart pounds in his ears and his blood rushes in his fingers.</p><p>A hand grasps his forearm, too fast to sense, and every muscle in his body freezes in a unanimous halt. </p><p>Run, run, RUN, his veins scream, desperate to survive, but every time he let himself be cowered by his instincts his friends have gotten hurt (Then again, even when Dream had control of every bit of himself his friends still got hurt).</p><p>“What did you need?” George asks, now seeming fully alert and functioning.</p><p>Before-Dream would’ve laughed and said that he hadn’t seen George wake that fast ever, but the Before is dead and so is Before-Dream and they will never live ever again.</p><p>“Nothing, it’s nothing, just go back to sleep,” he tries, because he shouldn’t have come here, he should’ve just gone outside to cool off, anything to keep himself from thinking over and over and over and over-</p><p>A scoff. “Obviously not,” George snips. His hold on Dream’s forearm squeezes, once, twice, before letting go. “I’m in the need of a bit of fresh air.”</p><p>Dream wants to scowl, to crow; “You were sleeping just seconds ago!” but he knows that George said it in lieu of calling Dream out on his lie, and it’s only because George has done so much for him that Dream follows without a word of protest.</p><p>He absentmindedly fiddles with his bandages as they walk, down a narrow, well-worn path that must inexorably lead to the taiga village just a few klicks away. Stray pebbles crunch beneath his tattered shoes, and the chilly night air whistles past his too-long hair in a taunting caress.</p><p>“So.”</p><p>Dream starts. Are they here already? It feels like just seconds ago he was leaving the confines of the cottage, with bricks in his head and flowers on his spine.</p><p>Does that even make sense? </p><p>Does it need to?</p><p>“So,” Dream parrots. He shifts uncomfortably beneath the piercing gaze he receives.</p><p>“You brought me out here, talk.”</p><p>“Well, technically, you’re the one that brought me out here-“</p><p>“Shut up and tell me why you woke me up in the middle of night for-“ George gestures uselessly at the air between them. “Whatever this is.”</p><p>“I- I don’t know why I woke you up.”</p><p>“You do. Stop bullshitting me, I’m giving you a chance but I’m not dumb.”</p><p>Dream wants to yell, you are! Because George is giving him another chance when he’s oh-so-undeserving of it.</p><p>“You aren’t,” Dream agrees, because that’s the easiest path to take with an angry, sleep-deprived George. “I never said you were. It was impulse, it means nothing. Let’s just go back inside-“</p><p>“WILL YOU SHUT UP?!” George yells, uncharacteristically loud. Dream goes silent, waiting with bated breath as George huffs up to him and jabs a pointy finger into his ribs. “YOU do not get to tell me that nothing is wrong with you. YOU do not get to tell me that you are fine, that this is a mistake. YOU do not get to tell me anything but the truth, because I did NOT just risk my arse and travel halfway across the whole fucking world just for you to be ‘fine’. I won’t hear it, I won’t.”</p><p>George’s outburst leaves him winded, with large, shaky breaths to intercept the silence of the cold night air. </p><p>And Dream- he feels guilty, to watch his friend get so worked up, to be so angry at him, for him, just because he’s so good at manipulating people to love him that he can’t get them to let go.</p><p>“Look,” Dream begins, when it looks like George won’t blow his top off if he so much as stutters a wrong word. “I don’t know what you expect from me. I don’t know why we’re out here – I don’t even know why you two are still helping me! You could be living happily in your own lives at the SMP without having to worry about a whole server plotting your death if you just left me behind.”</p><p>“Left you behind?!?!” George splutters incredulously. “For what? So you can be killed? So we can know that we left someone behind to be brutally murdered just because of something he did months ago?”</p><p>“Yes, George, yes! You should have left me, then we would’ve gotten what we all wanted.”</p><p>Dream pales. He was NOT supposed to say that. He knows it’s not true, it’s not true it’s not true, why does he feel like it is?</p><p>“Shut. Up,” George spits, eerily silent. “You did not just say that to me.”</p><p>It wasn’t my decision to live, Dream thinks bitterly. I didn’t want to live, and now I have to. </p><p>Dream swallows back the dry nothingness in his throat. “I did, George. You just don’t want to accept that yet.”</p><p>He turns to leave. There’s nothing more to be said to his former best friend, nothing more to do, absolutely nothing. </p><p>This time, a hand doesn’t grip his shoulder or his arm in vice, but a shout has the same effect anyways. </p><p>“Why are you so determined you’re condemned? Why don’t you give a single DAMN about getting better, Dream? Out of- what? Guilt?”</p><p>At his silence, George continues, bolstered.</p><p>“You know what, Dream? This isn’t your pity party. You can’t keep yourself from getting better just because it’s easier to mope around and say you’re bad. NEWS FLASH! Bad guys don’t feel guilty.”</p><p>Dream laughs, then, and it’s nowhere near the happy chuckle or wheeze that would split its way through his body during the times of Before, nor is it the sinister, malicious cackle During. Instead, it’s a dead, weary laugh of a man who’s been felled past the point of getting up.</p><p>“Really, George? Is that what you think?” Dream spits, bitter and sad and relieved and burdened. “Bad guys do feel bad. They just don’t change themselves for it.”</p><p>George says nothing, and Dream walks back to the cabin, alone.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>surely kudos, comments, and subscribers wouldn't help me feel better soon! toooootally not :)</p>
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